FMA: Game Over
by Lilac Lenalee
Summary: It's been a year since Ed's left, and now that he's returned Winry can't help but blissfully fear the feelings she gets when she looks at him. Are the two finally ready to put their relationship to the test and admit their feelings for each other? EdWin
1. Chapter 1

**A/N: **Konnichiwa, minna-san! I have finally decided to post the first part to my biggest fanfiction to date, yay! This was originally a contest entry I had planned for Otafest, but they... never had a contest... *tear* It's an EdWin fanfiction, and its set after the last episode from FMA Brotherhood. Before I let you read it though, I just wanted to say... this was definitely the hardest thing I've ever written. I grew as a human being after writing this. Everything that went on in this story, I experienced myself, and I feel like I matured because of that. So I really do hope you feel something from this story. That's my goal. I want to give something incredible to all those EdWin fans out there, because there beautiful relationship deserves to be celebrated. So this is dedicated to the entire EdWin loving community! Hope you enjoy! Tanoshinde kudasai!

Quick Note: Tadaima is a Japanese word said when returning home. It can roughly be translated to "I'm home" or "I'm back".

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><p>Waiting. She was good at it. A pro, one might say. And here she was again, standing, gazing off into the muffled, rain-framed distance. The clean-cut concrete ground of the station provided the perfect springboard for the rain; it was just smooth enough to constitute a slippery surface of rebound, yet mildly worn down by so many years of feet, feet that had been late, that had been casually strolling, that had been prodding and tip-toeing and shuffling and tripping and—and waiting—the rain just bounced off, with a sort of asymmetrical shiver, leading to its rapturous rupture.<p>

Yet, she could've sworn… the rain was waiting too. There was a split-second, she was almost sure of it, where the rain, it would hesitate, hesitate midair, as if to check the horizon of train tracks for any sign of screeching iron horses, before it would sigh and burst into watery oblivion. How nice the rain was, to wait with her like that.

It was one of those days, too, a day where, despite the sky shedding tears of liquidy nourishment in sheets and sheets of never-ending continuity, the heat still lingered, pressed down on you, kissed your cheeks with a heavy, slimy dryness that couldn't exactly be described correctly with words. It was that kind of heat that could amplify your moods, magnifying them to a point of breakage, a point of 'to hell with it', making you forget reason and see reality as nothing but a bitch slap in the face, a real douche bag who thought it was funny to see you flushed and melted. Yes, that kinda heat could melt you into a moody canvas of runny makeup, flushed cheeks, and liquid-parched lips that wouldn't respond to any offering of saliva even if you glossed them heartily with it. The heat, essentially, made everything worse.

But still… she waited.

It felt deserted, really. No other life forms, aside from herself, roamed the Resembool Station's grey, muggy grounds in expectance of someone. Well really, who would wait for someone this late? Even the lights had had enough nerve to call it a night and metamorphasize the waiting platform into a graveyard of empty blackness. But she didn't mind.

Okay, she_ did_ mind. Maybe just a little. But she had been too dedicated to her role of waiting to snag the chance to raise supreme hell with the station worker. And besides, the tangible sort of loneliness felt kind of nice. It fitted the dull mood rather charmingly.

A murmur of life, artificial as it was, sounded from behind. She turned around, eyes widening against heat's pressing weight, and found herself devouring the sight of a train, stampeding with mechanic smoothness towards her. The jarring, ear-crushing melody of grinding metal was all it took to awaken a huge smile across her face; he was home.

The waiting escalated, sped up to a speed that it hadn't achieved for quite some time, as the train roared to an intimately distant proximity. It smashed right through the rain, slicing apart its skin of flimsy coherence as it glided past her, chugging and chugging quicker and quicker towards Winry, propelling itself closer and closer to her awaiting presence, closer and closer to the ending of her worn-out waiting game. But…

It wasn't slowing down. The train, it continued to careen past, continued to insist upon the metal track that it had a destination it needed to get to, one that was further than Resembool, further than Winry, further than the little station filled with the games of waiting she so desperately loved. The train had had no intentions of stopping. None at all.

"Heh…"Winry couldn't help but unleash a sliver of her gratifying disappointment. How long had it been now… a year? Something like that? Of course, she_ knew_; her body had been programmed since the second he had left to keep a tab, setting the counter to tick off just how many cruel, hour-jammed days he'd be gone. That's right, the days had grown to despise her, and Winry despised them right back. They had enjoyed tormenting her with extra hours, hours that had forgotten what sixty minutes really felt like, amateur little time brats that thought it quite humorous to throw her into an even longer waiting game then she had initially prepared to participate in. She could feel them laughing now, the immature, hardly developed hours of the cold, newborn night. Who wouldn't laugh at her time-teased face?

A letter. That was all she had been granted, the only lifeline she had been offered to gobble up and treasure during her ruthless, never-ending waiting game. It had consisted of one sentence, made up of exactly four words, scribbled with haphazard care onto a dingy piece of lined paper that looked like it had performed a previous role to this one that had not involved it acting as paper. It had said:

_07/21 00:17: Book me an appointment._

Of course, the numbers hadn't been included in the final word count. Winry wouldn't allow them to be considered a countable form of the English language. But, nonetheless, she had engraved those numbers, chiselled them with a shy sort of excitement into the depths of her memory. She had acted like a complete schoolgirl over the half-ass letter, quite truthfully. After going off on a complete tangent to every customer she had had at work that day, and after fitfully entering and exiting her room about sixteen times before finally deciding not to throw out the damn piece of carelessly composed shit, she had built up the courage to analyze it with the eyes of a zealously jealous teenager. And she could've sworn, although every fibre of her body was desperate to persuade her otherwise, that she'd seen something she had probably never been meant to see.

At the bottom of the note, hidden delicately beneath the crinkly expanse of paper, was a smudge, a lead smudge that could mean nothing less than the presence of an erase mark, a mark that represented the writer's diligent attempt to hide something from the reader's view that had obviously been too emotionally unnerving for him to see in his own uncomposed, disfigured writing. Because beneath that smudge, beneath the leftover lead dirt that the eraser had not been able to remove from existence, was the barely visible scratch of two additional words, words that housed such an intense package of emotional meaning, she was surprised they had even made it onto the paper at all. She didn't blame him for erasing them. Yet at the same time, she did.

_Love you._

After being fully shot down by the secret's emotional context, she had decided to shove it in a place where she'd surely never look again, blaming the gods for making her think he had _ever_ written such a thing. It was so out of character, how_ could_ she believe it? Her eyes were evil. The heavens were evil, her mind was evil, and most importantly, Ed was still a prick. And so, she had continued her waiting game, a little more fired up than usual, with the mindset that she, Winry Rockbell, had been tricked into thinking she'd viewed something that had actually contained deep emotional meaning to it, written by the most emotionally inept idiot in the world. The nerve of fate sometimes.

So, in Winry's mind, those two words had never happened. And they most definitely had not been included in the final word tally, a fact that surely the author of the two unearthed words would've been very thankful to know. Yet somehow, the outright denial of a truth that she insisted was a lie but downright knew was a truth, unchangeable by fate and the stars and whatever other godly figures paraded around the heavens of fate, was very draining on her. Although she hadn't realized it at first, the black hole that had developed in her body shortly after his departure had begun to bloom, bloom into a toxically black black flower of tormenting loneliness and this never-ending feeling of black black emptiness. All she could feel was black. Black…. black… a shade of hurt, a shade of longing, a shade of hollow, endless misery… it festered deliciously within her, full of inspirational thoughts of separation, of being pulled apart from a force she had just barely discovered to be necessary to her life. There was no ending to the black hole. There was no beginning. No middle. And now, surely there'd be no conclusion…

A sudden jolt of her intuition heaved her back to the dreary, rainy presence of reality. Something was…

"Tadaima, Winry."

Her fingertips went completely numb. Her toes, her eyes, her mouth, everything had twisted into this spastic, frozen state of paralyzingly numb numb heat, a heat that was so cold it was hot, hot to the point of making one feel psychotically cold. She pivoted around, the rain swinging from her eyelashes like nervous trapeze artists clinging for dear life.

"Ed…"

She couldn't help it. They just came. The tears, they slid from her eyes like warm little crystals that had melted from the unbearable mugginess of the air compressing her, careening down her cheeks with such fortitude, such endearing supportlessness, she could barely remind her legs to remain composed. He was there. Right there, standing before her. Hands stuffed in his coat pockets as if trying to look like he didn't care… face stuck in that mildly pissed sideways frown… eyes cast off into the distance like he had better things to do then stand there being greeted by a display of womanly waterworks... so typical. He hadn't changed at all. Yet…

Unable to maintain her look of 'I'm too pissed off at you to be happy to see you' charade, Winry felt herself fly towards his body, her arms twining around his back like magnetized vines. An overwhelming wave of his warm, comforting scent washed over her, painting her in the richness of his strength, the boldness of his charisma, the comfort of his presence; tenderly, with a sort of shy hesitation, she snuggled deep into his chest, her hands bunching up his coat in fitful, uncontrollably happy bouts of tightly clenched reception. And, by the time Winry felt his warm arms capture her in his own embrace, pull her ever so slightly towards him with a sort of protective, physical display of want, of attaining that strangely unattainable desire, her emotions had been drowned senseless, floating about her body like limp corpses of invisible seaweed.

"I missed you…" the words slipped from her lips with more of an instinctive necessity than a direct desire, forcing her to look up into his luxuriously rich gold eyes. "I…" her lips quivered, creating a squiggly mess of her mouth that could no longer contain the emotional rampage of potently-brewed cathartic attack she'd been preparing for twelve months and sixteen days.

"Why didn't you write me more? How's your leg? Did you oil it regularly? I bet you used the cheap shit that I always tell you not to use but you use anyways, and please don't tell me you got into any fights, you're supposed to be travelling not brawling with the locals, and did you happen to get me any souvenirs? Not that I care or anything, but I do happen to care about the crappy time you chose to book me for a maintenance appointment, I mean seriously Ed can't you ever think about other people even just once in your life? I've been worried sick about you and you have the nerve to send me some half-ass four worded letter, I mean how do you think I felt after reading that and after having to deal with your absence yet again, I don't even know _why_—"

"Winry," Ed placed a finger to her lips, his mouth curling into a sort of cocky, smart-ass smile. "Shut up for just two seconds, would you?"

The teasing gleam of his eyes did nothing to help her overjoyed irritation at him. With a yank that nearly ripped his arm out of its socket, Winry was leading Ed away from the station in a huffy march. "I'm not gonna shut up till _you_ tell me why there was no train at the time you specified there would be."

"I never said what train I'd be taking."

"Well you managed to scribble down a time in your pathetic attempt of a letter to me."

"Who said anything about that being an arrival time?"

"Who said anything about writing four words and giving the most minimal amount of information EVER?"

"You assume too much."

"_You_ assume too much!"

The bickering continued to rattle the stillness of the night, each one completely unconcerned about the people who might be trying to get some shut eye as they passed the random blobs of houses dabbing the landscape, their roofs smeared by the rain so as to resemble one long, mismatched sepia painting. Yet somehow, Winry felt lighter than she had felt in a long time. A very long time. It was like the bickering was code for what they really wanted to say, and, if you actually wanted to decipher it, you'd discover a lot of sap-coated, mushy-gushy phrases that both had no intentions of ever outwardly vocalizing to one another. It felt good, yelling at him again. It felt better than she had ever imagined. Not that she had been fantasizing about this day or anything…

"Oi, Winry,' his voice punctured her in a way she wasn't expecting, making it feel like her blood was all gushing out in a heated waterfall effect. "Didn't you bring an umbrella?"

Dammit. She had been too excited to remember such a trivial necessity. "Nope. I decided it'd be funnier to watch you suffer."

"Well, what about you?" the way his voice softened, ever, ever so barely, ignited some kind of spark at the tip of her spine, one that electrocuted it into a useless rod of nervous tissue that had lost sight of its true function. She turned, just enough so that she could eye Ed with subconscious curiosity.

"What about me?"

He walked up to her, as if an answer wasn't at all necessary, as if an answer would've destroyed the moment that was undoubtedly building and building and building, just building to a point where everything would topple over in some grand climatic crash and—

He was right in front of her now, staring down at her, her staring up at him, what a change it was now, to be casting looks of bashful longing into his eyes like this, looking up into the golden heavens of his irises, deep into the soul that rested just beneath those optical golden gates. Without fair warning Ed wrapped his coat around Winry, its heavy material pressing down against her shoulders and making her knees wobble ridiculously as she summoned every ounce of strength to continue donating her composure.

"Do you want to see me worried that badly?" Ed muttered, his eyes darting back and forth in their attempt not to look directly at Winry. "I didn't come home just to watch you get sick you know."

The shadowy flush of the night provided outstanding coverage against Winry's reddening cheeks. "I…" the words she felt she wanted to say weren't coming, they were burrowing in the nooks of her throat, cowering from the chill of the outdoor air where their existence could be made audible. "… thanks."

They began walking again, both either looking down at the mucky ground or stealing sly, witty little looks at the other one to check if they were looking at them, or maybe just to reassure themselves that they weren't in a dream, that the other really _was_ still beside them and that they weren't waltzing through the world of unconscious night time fantasies that strike those who are separated for too long.

There was, however, a moment when Winry couldn't help herself; she just _had_ to stare. She had intended to stare only for a second, but her eyes had decided that they quite liked resting on the image of Ed, that they enjoyed devouring the way his chest moved and the way he glared at the ground with this sort of hard-pressed look of determination. There was just something about him that she still, after so many years of knowing him, found so sensually intriguing. It was like, if she peeked for long enough, the thoughts and feelings cowering within his body would start to seep through his skin and reveal to her their true colors, their true gravity. He was just like a giant birthday present, that one that you just couldn't ignore no matter what you distracted your mind with—its mysterious tug would always keep you guessing at its contents, yearning to just shake it and rip it up and analyze its every little detail in grave, rabid consumption, till you became hysterically high off pettily manufactured surprise. Just glancing at him produced that bulge of childish desire within her, every time.

"Hey… Ed?" Winry spoke softly, almost so as to have her voice meld silkily with the tum of the rain. "I… I really am glad you're back."

The buzz of the rain, like the static symphony one hears when switching between radio channels, inserted itself into the silence boldly, as if trying to blur out the sound of his voice, that deep voice that always held that slight tone of retaliation. She waited, but she never heard it.

Instead, Ed took a few steps closer to her, in a way that suggested he was rather hesitant about all this 'welcome back' sap, but in a way that also suggested, ever ever so slightly, that he really did want to close that gap between him and Winry. Not just the physical gap. The intimate gap, the gap that they had never quite managed to overcome before his departure, the gap that would truly bond them in ways they liked to think about but, when it came time to act, lost their grace and cowered behind shields of defensive verbal bickering…

His hand slipped into hers.

She swore the rain intensified. Just a little. Or maybe she was mistaking the pounding of her heart against her chest for the pattering of the sky's tears against her skin. Her whole chest throbbed, it throbbed till it seemingly forgot how to throb and then, just as it stuttered in pain, unsure of why it was convulsing, of why it was so flustered, a thrombosis of emotions too hard to dissociate, too hard to peristaltically slosh away and out of sight, would attack and send the chest into a fuzzy hailstorm of self-perpetrated heart throbbing. The feeling of someone else's palm, gently kissing hers with its cupped warmth, had never left her so emotionally paralyzed.

The movement of their feet, their destination, the weather… none of that even mattered anymore. Just being beside him, holding onto him, experiencing the synchronization of each other's heart beats— it was enough to heat up her extremities, fire them into a state of fitful impatience that made them scream for sinful contact. Winry let her grip tighten; she could just tell, now.

"Just say it already Ed," she didn't bother making eye contact; the slight inflection of her voice had been a good enough hint, even for someone like him.

His eyes scoured her face. "Huh?"

Okay, maybe she'd overestimated him. "I know you've been wanting to say it to me. I can just feel it."

The way his fingers dug nervously against her own elicited a playful smile across Winry's face; he'd figured it out.

"I dunno what you're talking about," he looked away, the image of a soggy Resembool landscape obviously easier to ingest visually than her rain-stained face.

"Oh like hell you don't!" Winry leaned in, her eyes morphing into slits of devilish sky blue. "Would you like me to help you out?"

"Not particular—"

"Oh Ed," Winry purposefully raised her voice to an overdramatic volume. "It just hasn't been the same without you here! I've missed you _so_ much!"

It was all she could do not to giggle as she watched his cheeks contract a feverish tint of blush.

"Okay here," she decided to make it a little easier on him. "I've missed you so much Ed, I dunno how I made it through without your aggravating pres—"

"Winry," Ed's voice, drenched in an unusually mature seriousness, cut through hers as if it'd been a block of sun-bathed butter. She glanced down at her boots, a tiny clot of bile searing her throat into a state of reflective regret.

"Sorry," the desire to say the word was genuine enough, yet somehow, it seemed out of context. Her heart practically tripped over itself as she felt Ed release her hand, leaving her ever so slightly isolated just a few footsteps ahead of him. She let it swing, back and forth, back and forth, as gravity offered it it's seemingly supportless support.

He was staring directly at the ground, shadow steeping his nose in a liquidless pool of rough inner tumult. The rain dribbled down the random strands of hair framing his face, panicked and lost, illuminating its gold hue with brilliant magnification. His mouth twitched a little.

"Are you… okay?" Winry asked hesitantly, unsure of whether or not the sound of her voice would make things better or worse.

Ed suddenly flipped his hair to the side, his golden eyes seeming farther off than they were due to the screen of distorting, nearly transparent rain. "I… missed you too… Winry…"

She didn't know anymore. Was it the rain? Her heart? Both? Why did everything seem so blaringly, blaringly loud? It was all so loud, so incredibly, outstandingly loud, loud, loud—

That wasn't the rain. She knew, that definitely wasn't the rain inching its way gracelessly, weightlessly down her cheeks. The rain wasn't warm like that. It wasn't the rain. It wasn't the rain blurring her vision, blurring her image of Ed standing before her, taller and more mature than ever, so insanely different yet so aggravatingly the same from how many years ago. The rain couldn't do that. It just couldn't…

"Ed…" Winry had lost full control of her voice, it came out in a squeaky, pathetically shaky mumble, but that was all she could manage to produce under the current circumstances, how else was she supposed to communicate in such rainy, watery weather?

Her arms were wrapped around him, pressing firmer than necessary into the muscles of his back, squeezing his tall, taller than her figure into her own as best she could before she even realized her id had completely summoned her body on its own. Burying her face deep into his chest, deep into the layers of clothing sealing off his pure, naked body, Winry forced all of her weight right into Ed's grasp, bowling them both into a tango of stumbling, fumbling feet, propelling them vigorously into the unsteady grip of gravity until neither could hold the other up, till both had lost all sense of balance and control—

They landed with a jolt, Winry's body lying flat on top of Ed's as he tried his hardest to recollect himself. The mud wheezed beside them, coughing up onto their limbs and clothes in dirty bouts of disturbance, but Winry didn't care. All she could feel, all she could hear, all she could see, could taste, could smell….

"Edward Elric…" her voice was hoarse and gruff, the words scraping past her lips like worn-out, torn apart secrets finally unleashing their weight. She went to speak again, went to exchange just the right amount of air for words, when Ed leaned forward and hugged her, pulling her closely towards his warm, toned body, clutching her so close she could feel his hair and his cheeks painting her with stale raindrops.

Words seemed so mundane now. So, so mundane. She couldn't think of any anyways.

Winry inhaled shakily, her muscles and bones loosening their grip and forgetting their purpose till she simply fell limp in Ed's arms, leaving nothing but her hands weakly holding onto his shoulders. This waiting… this big huge game of constant, never-ending, soul-wrenching waiting… finally… _finally_…

"I love you," she whispered the words right into his chest; she didn't know if she even produced any sound, didn't know if all she'd done was mouthed the three worded, three syllable sentence of ultimate cliché, outlining the words against Ed's chest with a ring of tears, rain and saliva – but it didn't even matter. The game was over. It was finally over. All over. No more waiting. No more being alone. It was simply…

_Game over. _

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><p><strong>AN: **I have nothing to say but... I love EdxWinry. *runs away and hides for eternity*

Reviews/faves/watches are ALWAYS welcome and greatly appreciated! I love you all! :'D Stay tuned, there's plenty more to come!


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N:** Chapter 2! :D This was the second hardest chapter for me to write. Why? Well... just because... My only comments about it would have to be... I've been reading far too much doujinshi! X3 Oh well, doujinshis good for the soul (ya right Shannon). Enjoy~

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><p>"But you're <em>caked<em> in mud!"

"You're the one that got me dirty!"

"Don't push the blame onto _me_ Edward Elric! You are taking off those clothes and that's FINAL!"

Her bedroom had never seemed so crowded. Or wet. The wooden floorboards were glistening in raindrop varnish, and on top of that slightly significant problem Edward Elric was standing in her room layered in mud. Things could not get any more irritating.

"Okay Winry, if you absolutely_ insist_…"

What the hell was his problem? Obviously if he continued drip-drying like a complete idiot he'd end up catching a cold, and on top of that he was creating a serious hazard by littering the floor with his dirty Elric mud water, in which someone was sure to sprain their ankle on late in the night. His ability to act sensible had seemingly not improved since he'd—

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING?"

Winry's eyes nearly popped out of her head as she watched Ed freely begin to take off his shirt. In her room. With her evidently present. He continued to just stand there, shirt halfway off his body, as she bore a hole through his taught little six-pack.

"You asked for this."

"I DID NOT!"

"Well where the fuck would you—"

"PUT IT BACK ON DAMMIT!" She was beginning to feel highly nauseous. Most likely from all the blush crinkling her face into a fiery red mess. Or maybe from the fact that Ed had just been about to completely strip down in _her_ room. Yet… she'd seen him like this so many times before… why did it suddenly seem so terribly insidious—

"Okay, _fine_…" Winry took a deep, trembling breath, her composure snapping back into place. "I'll leave, and you change."

She gave a flippant whip of the head, her feet guiding her a safe distance out the door before she spun back around and thrusted it shut with a haughty _hmph!_.

However, she had barely taken a step away from the 'occupied room' when a thought of striking importance hit her: she had left her underwear out on the bed. In plain sight.

Not good.

Providing no warning whatsoever Winry thrashed open the door, her eyes landing directly on a topless Ed in the process of unzipping his pants.

All she could manage to do (aside from shushing her nervous system's over-dramatized eye candy identification alarm) was produce an awkward laugh. "Woopsies, sorry 'bout that…" she giggled ridiculously, the mental image of Ed staring at her like she was some psychotic nutcase making her soul evaporate right out of its mortified casing.

Carefully (probably too carefully) she closed the door, divorcing her eyes from the growingly hard-not-to-look-at image located in her room. An immediate attack of hyper-ventilating followed suit, complete with a body overly hyped up on epinephrine and a heart that was trying to beat the world record for most thumps in a second.

Yet still, the fact remained that her underwear was in there, unhidden, calling out with their pink lacy lining for the whole world to come ogle over. She had to save her underwear. No, her _dignity_. Yes, her dignity was at stake here, along with her image as a conscientious, hard-working young lady just brimming with the potential to become a future automail extraordinaire. Yes, her underwear had to be rescued, before it was too late—

Winry flung the door open again, its knob smacking the wall with a dent-worthy _thud_ as she searched the vicinity for her underwear. But her eyes were taken hostage by another entity in the room, one whose presence was a much stronger, much more imperializing one in comparison to her tiny pink undies, leaving her numbly gawking at sights she had no intentions of sighting and conjuring images her brain was not at that moment prepared to conjure, oh the horrifying feeling of being glued to the spot—

"Is there a problem?" Ed asked innocently enough, nothing but a pair of faded white boxers covering his very well-toned body. Yet somehow, Winry did not take his comment as being very innocent. He was doing this to her on purpose. Oh yes, he was trying to make her look like a perverted little whore-faced—

"NOPE GOODBYE!"

The door was slammed so hard its direction of swing nearly reversed. She stood there, hand stuck to the doorknob, relentless in its attempt to keep that door wide wide open for the whole town of Resembool to see. She had officially forgotten how to breathe.

Embarking on a tug-of-war match with her hand, Winry was again hit by the cold hard fact that her underwear _still_ remained air-bathing on her bed, advertising itself to all who surrounded it. She yanked her hand off with a strained huff, her eyes bulging from being toiled with in such a vulgar, uncivilized way.

She had to finish her mission. Had to.

Taking a deep, chakra-aligning breath, Winry allowed herself to open the door with a mature amount of force, its hinges squeaking liberally as she freely welcomed herself back into the visual battle zone. She ignored the idiot looming before her with a highly refined look of snootery, not at all noticing that he was now casually clothed in a clean pair of jeans and had yet to put back on a top.

"Uh, Winry…"

"Silence!" she lifted her hand with a commanding snap. "I did not come in here for the purpose of fulfilling my perverted fantasies, but instead, for the sole purpose of retrieving my adorable little—"

"—this?"

Her stomach skydived before she even got the chance to see what 'this' correlated to. Braving the sight that inevitably existed before her, Winry was pleased to look upon her hot pink lacy thong being presented to her, lazy-ass chauffeur style, by Ed's hand. Her vocal cords went into autopilot mode before her mind could even produce legible words.

"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU'RE DOING FINGERING MY UNDERWEAR?"

"You mean you actually wear one of these?"

"YES ED, I _DO_ WEAR A THONG, IS THERE A PROBLEM WITH A MATURE WOMAN SUCH AS MYSELF WEARING A THONG?"

"So you're wearing one right now?"

His question was left very purposely unanswered as Winry violently ripped the flimsy pink material from out of his hand, her face matching its pinky hues with stunning accuracy.

"Get out."

"Nah."

"I said get out!"

"Then where the fuck am I supposed to sleep?"

"With the dog, obviously!"

"HA, you're funny Winry!"

"GET OUT!"

Even the room seemed to shake at her tectonic plate shifting command. With a look of unaffected stubbornness, Ed strutted coolly past Winry, hands shoved down his pant pockets in a way he undoubtedly thought made him look ultra cool. "Okaaay, guess I'm sleeping with Den then…"

Winry felt a vein upset the smoothness of her facial skin. "Wait."

Ed continued walking.

"I said WAIT DAMMIT!"

Thoughtlessly, or perhaps with thought that she would've liked to have been thoughtless, Winry bolted in front of him, a stubborn frown stretched across her face as she shot down his defiant golden orbs with her own cheeky blues. "I told you to wait!"

An incredibly cocky, overtly evil smirk inched across his face. Winry felt her heart faint. "Are you a liar, Winry Rockbell?"

Her eyes blinked in shock. "Obviously not."

"Then why'd you tell me to get out when you really wanted me to stay?" he took a step towards her, his eyes like crackling stars of thunder beneath the murky veil of night.

"Piss off Ed," Winry tore her eyes away from his gaze, fearful of being electrocuted into an eternal state of staring if she'd have continued for a split-second longer. "You can't classify that as a lie."

"So then you weren't lying when you said you wore thongs?" he placed his hand on the wall behind her, his face looming ever so close to her own.

"Nope."

"You weren't lying when you said you missed me?"

"Do you really think I'm _that_ mean?"

"And you weren't lying when you said you loved me?"

"Of course no—"

Her mouth shut down. Her mind shut down. Her body shut down. Everything just shut down. All she could see, all she could hear, was Ed, Ed Ed Ed, he was overtaking her, unfairly invading her, approaching her, locking her body into a stupefied position of non-retaliation as he leaned in towards her, hypnotizing her with those sweet, crystal honey eyes of his, it wasn't fair, he wasn't allowed to devour her weak spots like that, wasn't allowed to alchemize her into a state of oblivious insensibility with those clever words of his, wasn't allowed to just take her heart and dissect it of all its secrets and heavily-locked coverts—

"I… I…" Winry's mouth was barely moving, her vocal cords hardly vibrating, it was all she could do to _not_ glance down at his mouth, that part of his body drawing her closer and closer and deeper and deeper into his control… "I never said that."

"Winry," the way he said her name, breathed it with such a deliberate, eloquent inflection, made her spine completely liquefy, forcing her to collapse right against the wall's wooden support. "I thought you said you weren't a liar."

His breath was grazing her now, caressing her face in a pleasurably wicked way that made her lips involuntarily pucker, instinctively part and pant and beg, beg for something they had only ever dreamed about, had only ever experienced in the realm of dreams and nightmares and lurid delusions—

"I… I'm not a liar," the words stuck to her teeth, stuck to the air with the sticky, heavy weight of spoken, air-kissed lies, forcing her eyes to just barely hover open and her lips to just barely reach out more…

"Then why are you lying to me?" he was looking straight into her, the gold rings of his eyes lassoing her into a position of unmovable, powerless immobilization, snaking the soul right through the emptiness of her pupils, teasing her into this state where lying was no longer possible, no longer feasible…

"I'm not…" Winry didn't know what to do. For once in her life, she literally had no sense, no instinct, no intuitive flicker informing her of what to do; she was completely barren. Deserted. Alone. Yet…

They were literally only inches apart now. Their lips. Inches.

"I really do… I…" her back oozed down the wall, down down down. She was sinking. She was sinking into the ground, melting into a puddle that would carpet the floor and moisturize the wood. "… I really do… love you…"

Whatever force had been holding them apart before was gone; within one petrified second, Winry had lost all ability to stand, her body nearly catapulting to the ground before Ed had wrapped his arms around her, pulled her towards his body and smashed his lips into hers. Somehow Winry managed to thread her arms around his neck, sensually fingering the outline of each little neck muscle, grinding her lips deeper and deeper into his until her entire body gave out, pulling both her and Ed down to the ground into some sort of uncomfortably comfortable sitting position that left Winry being shoved against the wall and Ed sprawled over top of her as her pelvis desperately, gravely tried its hardest to ram into his body, align itself with the smoothness of his waist. Their mouths were starved, uncontrollable, manoeuvring past strands of wet, spit-glistening hair and massaging the other's lips with propulsive movements of climatic desire, a taste test of saliva and skin and tongue—

She didn't know how it happened. They just went… her hands, they were sliding up and down Ed's chest, thriving off the feeling of its strength, creating a fuzzy, orgasmic layer of friction that both excited and terrified Winry's insides, making her clitoris pulse and her vagina radiate with heat and unbearable, insatiable craving. Hair plastered across her back, smeared across her face, she pressed further into Ed's mouth, her breaths coming and going in short, laborious gags that hardly accomplished anything besides exciting the lungs into a feeling of false starvation. For so long she'd waited, for so so long she'd put up with playing that fucking game of cat and mouse, of waiting and waiting and waiting, and now she could finally feel her insides again, feel the flaming beat of her heart as it shrieked out in palpitating, systolically unending lust, feel the savagery of her female organs as they shivered in erotic gratification. She had never tasted something that had tasted quite like this, she could taste it in her mouth, her chest, her blood, her mind, it contaminated her, dirtied her, fed the sinful pleasures that had been hidden for so long in the dingiest prison cells of her id. She couldn't handle it any longer, the tolerance had evaporated with the continual rising and falling of their tightly twined bodies, she was growing hornily impatient…

Ed's hands slid beneath her tank top, crawling their way with sticky smoothness to places where Winry didn't want them to go, where she knew they'd go, where she ever so desperately desired them to go—

"E-Ed…" Winry's thighs quivered violently, pressing stiffly up towards the sky as they tried to make contact with his lower half, doing everything in their power to remain raised and interceptive. Ed's lips had detoured from her mouth, pressing against her neck, journeying closer and closer to the rise of her chest, leaving her in a state of complete and utter immobility, yet a kind of immobility that commanded her to seek and create pleasure in any way possible, so long as she remained in heavy bodily contact with Ed. A delectable moan seeped from her lips as she felt his tongue race across her navel, tracing her belly button with its wet, chilly pressure.

She'd barely even had a chance to think when Ed lifted his mouth from off her stomach, his lips gravitating back towards Winry's, hands sliding smoothly beneath the flaps of her tank and up the length of her back. However, his lips weren't moving fast enough for her standards, she needed to reunite with them faster, needed to satisfy her craving for passionate mouth fondling quicker, she could feel her heartbeat punching her crotch and turning it into a rhythmical pad of desire, hot and steamy, prepped for interception. Fervently she injected her tongue into Ed's mouth, its sloppy surface lacing around his in sensual pressurization. The top of her tank, the area that had only ever so fragilely covered her chest, was being pushed further and further down her body, its straps sliding perilously across the slopes of her shoulders till her breasts peeped out, firm and erect, smothering their plump curvature temptingly across Ed's chest. This skin to skin contact, so alarmingly intimate yet delightfully warm… for so long she's waited for this…. for so long. Experience didn't even matter. The pleasure being configured between the two's touching and kissing and moaning, it was magical enough to erase the tiny flaws and hesitations. She stole a gasp as Ed's lips traveled their way down towards her collarbone.

Perhaps it was due to their separation, a separation that had been both necessary and far too long to handle, that everything seemed to be so deep and passionate. Winry didn't want him to leave. She didn't want him to leave ever, ever again. She wanted to hug and kiss him like this whenever she wanted, and to feel the strength of his body wanting her and only her, no other female body in the world but hers. He left her suffering from such erotic paralysis after each and every kiss… Winry had fallen for him about fifty times over in less than a minute. But she couldn't let him be the only daring one in this relationship; she took the plunge, began nipping his earlobe, dotting it with the moist tip of her tongue before squeezing it with seductive pressure, like a carnivorous flower sucking the life out of its prey, always keeping him in a moment of half-aware suspense. Sensing his enjoyment, she let her lips slide off, their wet surface hovering just above the opening of his ear. "Told you I'm not a liar."

Her raspy voice escalated into a full-on groan; Ed's hand was now pressing into her vagina, groping and squeezing it, sending her into an uncontainable scraping motion along the floor, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth…

The air smacked at her bare, naked skin with a cool briskness, giving rise to the fact that Winry wasn't wearing shorts anymore, informing her that they had long been disposed of, informing her that the time had almost come where she would be giving herself to him, all of its purity and innocence and naivety, all of it, all of it was going to Ed, all of it…

As each layer of clothing was peeled off by greedy, yearning hands Winry couldn't help but have a quick moment of panic, a terrifying moment of paralyzingly thick panic; however, the moment she sensed Ed's presence, warmly pressing against her, rising and falling with breathy surges of life… she knew it'd all be okay. She'd been waiting so long for this. And besides, she'd promised— she'd give him everything…

* * *

><p>It was different. There was definitely something very very different about her. The mirror didn't lie. It would always dependably reflect back at you the truths you already knew were true, but just needed visual evidence for in order to grippingly, credibly believe. It was the bluntest way one could face themselves in the morning. The cold, hard reflection of a mirror, so clean and vibrant in its communication efforts, a messiah of miniscule truths, only given away by the flaws of the face as it held back the secrets it had been sworn to hold, its only hints tiny facial fragmentations and complexion cracks. After all, the face was like the mirror of the soul, putting artistry and word to the body's thoughts and feelings. And it's pretty damn hard to hide something in a mirror. Despite its truthful intentions, it was the biggest back-stabbing traitor you could ever face so early in the morning.<p>

And that's just what Winry did. She stared at herself, stared right at the big, introspective traitor fastened to the bathroom wall before her, her eyes like newly blossomed bluebells getting their first glimpse of a thundercloud. Something _internal_ was off… something not even the Big Bad Mr. Mirror could see… she could feel it.

Peeling her gaze away from her reflective twin, Winry went to grab her toothbrush, its pink plastic handle digging into her palm with a relentless viciousness she had never before known her toothbrush to house. Why did everything seem so overdramatized this morning?

Muscle memory assisted her in dressing the toothbrush for its formal date of tooth brushing; Winry shoved its head into her mouth, the spangled banner of toothpaste mushing against her teeth with pasty clinginess. Her taste buds recoiled as the mint flavour speared them into tingly awakening.

As she released a bomb of saliva-infected toothpaste into the sink, another presence appeared beside her, slicing the mirror into a broken, overtaken world of claustrophobic compactness, into a two-part ice cube that had only ever been created with the intentions of being a single unified one.

Ed had awoken.

Winry cast her eyes downward, toothbrush quickening its scrubbing pace almost to the point of panic but not quite. Those pink silk pyjamas she was wearing, sweetly blushing at her from the mirror's volumeless depths, suddenly felt very very… contaminated. The tank top's crushed rose petal shimmer, it no longer smiled at her, no longer concealed her, but instead flirted with its surroundings and made it a point to exemplify the very tiny bit of stomach peek-a-booing from out above her shorts. Her crotch began pulsing, sore and tired but driven mad by the presence now right beside her, ultra conscientious of its every movement and every jerk forward as toothpaste came sliding from out of his mouth with stringy luxuriousness. The pulsing ascended into an orgasmic wince.

Winry covered up her reddening face by spitting sloppily into the sink, teensy dobs of toothpaste outlining her lips haphazardly. Ed immediately copied her actions, only the sound of excess toothpaste escaping his mouth much more audibly intrusive than Winry's concise little spit.

Forcing herself to hold on to her maturity and not make some smart-assy comment proved difficult, but Winry managed nonetheless, her strength as a highly dignified, highly sophisticated individual shining through even amidst the morning awkwardness. She closed her eyes, allowing the minty overload gassing her mouth to fill her nasal passage and take her on a resurrecting journey of morning arousal, the toothbrush absently jabbing the side of her mouth as she artificially lost herself in the moment.

The spit that had been sluggishly frothing down her throat two seconds ago, however, came back up again in a shocking counterattack of regurgitation as she felt Ed's hand rest gently on her head. Her eyes remained closed, too afraid to peek at the unfolding scene, but she could most definitely feel his fingers lacing between her tussled strands of hair, ever so softly patting them down and reassuring them into a smooth state of untussled, bed-headless composure. She could just tell what he wanted to say to her with that simple press of the palm, that reassuring rest of the fingers, the leaching of his warmth right into her scalp, her skull…

Almost as soon as it had happened, it ended; Ed bent down to give one final spit-emptying of the mouth, threw a towel over his shoulder, and strutted out of the bathroom with a morning saunter that made it look as if he had something important to do but he was too groggy to remember what. Winry's toothbrush hung from her mouth, sliding past her lips till its head caught against her teeth; maybe nothinghad changed after all. Maybe… maybe…

No. That internal feeling of heaviness, like something had intruded into her body and began to fester and multiply and perform vast operations of asexual reproduction that would completely take over her body and cover her in some sickening rash—

No. It wasn't that bad. Yet, it was, at the same time. It was maddening, really. Completely and utterly maddening. Never before had she felt so insanely invaded, so filled up and encroached, when she knew there was nothing to even worry about. She was perfectly fine. The same old Winry Rockbell she had been yesterday, right?

…

Something told her… something that felt intuitive, but at the same time wasn't her normal twinge of intuition, more like this natural bed of instinct that had been lying dormant within her for this incredibly long, long period of time… this 'thing', so to speak…

It was telling her something would never be the same.

* * *

><p><strong>AN:** And with that, I would LOVE to hear your thoughts! This chapter was actually a lot of fun, because I had lot of fun writing about Ed and Winry's bickering, hehe! But anyways, stay tuned for chapter 3!

Many thanks go out to all those who read/faved/reviewd/watched this story! Thank you so much! And as usual, feedback and all that jazz is always welcome. However, I do want to make mention quickly... if you don't enjoy my writing style, or you find it's not to your liking, please don't bog me down with reviews about it. I've worked very hard to hone and develop my own personal style, and, while I realize I cannot please everyone, I try my best with what I can do. While I respect those of you who enjoy simpler styles of writing, I'd appreciate it if you didn't leave a review criticizing my writing style because of that. My writing comes directly from my soul, and my main goal is to simply provide EdWin fans with a fanfic they can enjoy and fangirl a little over. Thanks for understanding guys! :)


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N: **Chapter 3! And we have a few special guests in this chapter, ohoho! Enjoy :)

* * *

><p>* ~ <em>4 weeks later<em> ~ *

A rope of saliva, glinting sheens of diluted rainbow beneath the sun's pale morning glow, clung to Winry's mouth, swinging in a drunkishly elliptical manner until its bulbous end marred the toilet water in sticky reunion. It looked like a dollop of syrupy crystal, gently dotting the surface of the swamp below her with its semi-purity before melting into its vulgar contents, forever lost. Having a staring contest with a toilet full of vomit proved to be a very trying task, particularly when one's stomach felt like it was resting on a vibrating waterbed.

The convulsion came again, this time with a vicious assault to her throat; Winry's muscles flexed then contracted, contorting into a paralyzed, immobilized heap as the contents of her stomach traveled up her throat and erupted from her mouth. Glimmering jewels of vomit accessorized the toilet rim, and the water below her had undergone a complete facelift—what had just a moment ago looked like the birthplace for a mushy rainforest now resembled something like a rotten swamp, rich in diversity from the half-digested food chunks puncturing its surface to the swirls of stomach bile adding an artistic, beauteous touch of refinement.

Her stomach shivered again, clenching onto every muscle within clenchable distance and writhing in agonized anticipation for yet another reverse. Minutes turned to hours, hours turned to minutes—her body clock was completely fucked. All night she'd been there, sprawled across the bathroom floor, waiting. Waiting for her body to reject first the food she had eaten for dinner, then the water she had drank before bed, and then, when there was nothing left to reject, no foreign masses of food and liquid waiting to be eaten and deprived of nutritional value by the acids of the body, her stomach went on to reject its own bile, an ally in this upchucking mess, forcing it up her throat like an acidic tongue that licked everything into a world of chaotically raw raw vulnerability. The tiled floor had proven to be very productive in leaching warmth from everything it touched, leaving Winry cold, miserable, and feeling like her stomach was being mindlessly stirred, round and around and around, over and over and over, like rice pudding slowly simmering on the stove, just keep it moving and twirling and swirling…

Another failed firework display of bile spewed from her mouth, landing in the toilet with a fizzling plop. Tiny fragments of the stomach juice was caught in her throat, captured by its rough, skin-stripped surface till it formed sticky cobwebs, perfect for capturing air and turning it into an ample choking mechanism. Winry, with the pitifully minute amount of strength she had left, attempted to hack through the bile's strong web, but instead only felt it sway within her throat, mimicking a slime-coated pendulum.

The door beside her creaked open. Great, someone was going to see her in this weak, crippled state, hair tips crusted in vomit and arms feebly hugging the toilet-bowl as if she'd puked her heart right into it and was now left with nothing to do but sit there and babysit it in its playground of puke. Just fucking great.

There was a moment of silence, one of those moments where you excruciatingly wished there was something there to break it, but there just wasn't, and you have to sit there suffering the consequences that come with all deafeningly heavy silences. Without even looking (she didn't have the strength to anyways), Winry knew who it was. Womanly instinct.

"Again?" his voice scraped the air, a faint tone of worry, hardly distinguishable by the human ear unaccustomed to his voice, making it sound that much blunter. Winry let his question echo on answerlessly.

She could hear his footsteps approaching her, slowly drawing closer and closer, their warmth flickering off vaguely into the tiles' cold greedy hands—

Her entire body suddenly heaved inwards, her hands gripping the toilet seat with despairing conviction as she contracted into a spiny ball, the rejection fluid bubbling up her throat and tormenting her insides till they grimaced and clenched, fighting with all they had to push the puke back, stop it from making its dramatic exit…

Giving a hard, bone-jerking cough, Winry succeeded in emptying her stomach for about the fifty billionth time that night. Oh wait, it was morning now. Or was it? Fuck, who knew anymore. She watched, emotionlessly, as the bile became engulfed by the quicksand of vomit warming her face below. How long had she been doing this…

"You should've woke me up," Ed's hands brushed delicately past her shoulders, his fingers collecting all her scraggly hair and pulling it back away from her face. She could feel him dividing it into three segments, gentle tugs pulling at her scalp as he started wrapping and winding it into one long, softly pleated braid. The air, despite reeking of bodily acids and reject mush, felt almost relaxed… peaceful.

"It wasn't a big deal," Winry rasped, her voice meagre and quivery. "I was fine… I'm fine…"

"Winry."

He'd completely seen through her lie.

"This has been going on for three days now," he muttered the words softly, yet, despite the low volume, they were thickly coated in seriousness, a seriousness Winry hadn't seen a lot but would often replay in her mind during times of stress, times of need, times of laying on the bathroom floor wishing she'd just puke her guts out and die…

"It's probably just something I ate." That's right… it was something she ate. Obviously.

"Whatever," Ed stood up, his voice adopting that familiar tone of his where he tried to act like he hadn't just been consoling someone, that it had all just been a mirage, a figment of the imagination. "I gotta go pick up Al."

"No!" Winry's voice was a groggy screech, her vocal cords unable to vibrate quickly enough amidst the swarm of bile stretched across her throat like an over-chewed wad of gum. "No Ed…"

"You're not coming like this Winry," he uttered the very words she hadn't wanted to hear but knew were coming anyways. "I…" his voice stuttered slightly, as if he wasn't sure he should be channelling his thoughts into audible words. "I won't let you."

"But," hot, sticky tears began leaking from her eyes, slinking down her face in vivid zigzags and sticking to her cheeks like little dots of stray adhesive, orphaned by her eyes and left with no place to fall and dissipate, no oblivion to call home. "B-But I want to be there when he comes. I want to be there Ed! I don't wanna be like this!"

"Here."

She looked up at him with dewy, magnified eyes, her face stiff with tear scars; he was offering her his hand, his face contorted into a sort of sideways frown that almost made it look like he was doing this simply out of habitual, well-mannered kindness, but that Winry knew was nothing but an immature cover instilled for the sake of protecting his 'masculinity'. Weakly, she placed her hand into his, and almost immediately felt her butt levitate off the floor as he pulled her right into his chest, the swelling and collapsing of it like a physical lullaby of instantaneous relaxation.

"You okay?" the words tickled her ear warmly, somehow managing to elicit a fresh batch of tears. They skated right down her face, its surface a skating rink of wet slippery skin, burrowing into the cracks of her mouth, assaulting her taste buds with the blunt, poignant taste of somatic salt, sloshing all over Ed's shirt till it darkened with damp shadows. She let go of her neck, allowing her face to fall right into his chest, forcing herself to be blind of all surroundings, of all images of reality and of all reminders of her sickness, she wanted to muffle it all, dispose of it, hide it away in the protective embrace of Ed forever…

"I hate waiting Ed," her voice was dry and gravelly, blurred by the proximity of Ed's body to her mouth. "I hate it."

His arms wrapped around her, rubbing her back with a soothing sort of reassurance that she had lost during the night's cold lapse of greed; he pulled her closer, making the space that had been between them nothing but a fictionalized past. "I know."

His scent overpowered her, completely imperialized her nose, then her body, then her mind, just flooding her with this merciless overload of never-ending, soul-comforting Ed, forcing her to overdose on something that at that moment would make her feel like a blissful little mass of highly loving mist, but, once she'd been withdrawn from his scent, forced to smell the bland, normal, scentless air, she would feel hollow again, empty and hollow and miserably alone, alone, alone…

"Listen," Ed whispered gently, his voice hardly audible, like a personal dialogue that she and she only could hear, could devour, could audibly hold onto and replay again and again and again. "I'm gonna go pick up Al, okay? And you're gonna—"

"But Ed—" a violent cough ripped apart her words, sending tears cascading down her cheeks and her body convulsing against Ed's as she tried to recompose herself. The taste of bile was peeking up her throat, ready to launch its way into the world at any time.

"Just listen to me, would you?" his finger swept across her cheek, collecting her tears and making them collapse into nearly forgotten watery scrapes as he looked deep into her magnified blue eyes. "Your job is to get better for us, not wait. Al will understand."

For the first time that day, that long long never-ending relentless day of uncountable hours and minutes and seconds, Winry looked Ed right in the eyes. She pierced his golden orbs with her own watery blues, and she pierced them till she was sure they understood, till she was absolutely positive that she had sucked all the strength right out of them and adopted it for herself. "Okay."

With Ed's help, Winry was able to escape the torturous confines of the bathroom, the room that had been her sickly prison cell for three nights straight and reeked of the dirtiest parts of her body. Her insides felt as if they'd been flipped inside out, left to perform their duties with a complete handicap, one that left them dazed and confused, blind and unable, yet she ignored the feeling and instead revelled in the way Ed placed his arm around her and ever so gently led her in the right direction, cautiously making sure she had managed every step on the stairs as they went down and continually assuring that she was fine and perfectly capable of standing on her own two feet once he left. It was kinda funny, seeing Ed act outwardly worried like that. His inexperience at it was blaringly obvious.

"You sure you're gonna be okay?" there was no hiding the concern in his voice now.

Winry gave a weak smile, her body secretly screaming out to the non-listening world as Ed stood in the doorway, about to leave her enduring another waiting game. "Who do you think I am?"

Despite the eye roll, Winry couldn't help but tingle inwardly as she saw a tiny smile chisel away at his frowning expression. "Whatever. Just make sure you're serving us tea in a maid outfit when we get back!"

"EXCUSE ME?"

"Just kidding!" he gave a sinister laugh as he opened the door, his devilish side having apparently returned to him in full swing. But just as Winry prepared herself to watch him off, he turned back around, that sudden, familiar look of frowny shyness plastered across his face. He was glaring right at Winry, in a way that made her want to strangle the very life out of him yet at the same time made her want to run away and go shove her face in a pillow, where she could safely access the girly sanctuary of fantastical daydreams.

Before she could even ask, Ed had stepped back in and kissed her on the cheek. It had been the quickest, most despicable thing, yet had somehow managed to leave Winry completely and utterly flabbergasted, standing in the doorway with her mouth hanging open like he had just stolen every sac of air her lungs contained. Redness blotted her cheeks with rapid vividness, looking ten times worse thanks to her pale complexion.

And then he was off, before she could even retaliate back. She watched, with a sort of blank fulfillment, as Ed strode towards the station, a mist of parched dirt floating behind him as he shuffled across the chapped ground. She had hardly even realized that her hand was sprawled across her face, fixatedly touching the vicinity of skin that had been graced with the pathetically hasty contact of his lips. Somehow, the wait didn't seem like a wait at all; the game was over before it had even begun.

* * *

><p>Cinnamon buns. She was gonna make some homemade, ooey-gooey cinnamon buns, the kind that made people jealously drool as they walked past your house and captured a waft of that buttery, nostalgia-eliciting aroma. Al would surely be half starved by the time he got home. Winry was sure he'd appreciate some good old home-style Resembool baking.<p>

"Okay, let's see here…" she swung open the pantry door, eyes partaking on a rigorous safari as she scanned the savannah of ingredients assiduously. Her stomach gave a displeased stomp, obviously on the verge of throwing yet another projectile tantrum; however, Winry was not going to let her ever so minor sickness stop her from making something nice. Ignoring its queasy pleas, she began to gather her ingredients, a stubborn grimace etched across her face as she swallowed back a mouthful of bile.

Despite the brutality her opponent was showing her, Winry continued to gather her supplies, the genuine desire to bake something of extreme homey deliciousness giving birth to a sort of strength she had previously been dehydrated of, that she had had to watch be thrown into the toilet about ten million times last night as her body purged itself of all purgable contents. She dumped the first mound of ingredients into her bowl, a grimy plume of powder puffing into the air like chalky mist.

Shit. Something was wrong. The powdery mound of ingredients… it just didn't look right. No… no… it just didn't _seem_ right. But she'd followed the recipe exactly as she always did…

A twinge sliced her stomach, forcing her to keel over and push into the sharp features of the countertop till she could hardly distinguish that pain from the pain of her insides. Her organs felt like they were somersaulting about in agonized celebration, like they were being fed a mixture of sparkling blood that just powered them into this state of hyperactive festivity, they just couldn't stop moving, couldn't stop pumping out the epinephrine, couldn't stop jabbing her insides and partaking in a seemingly never-ending twinge-fest—

It was all she could do to sprint to the sink in time. The vomit just gushed out, coating the sink and the countertops in its sickly brown glimmer, dripping from her lips like a leaky tap unable to quit wetting itself. Fuck, she didn't even know she had anything _left_ to puke up. Apparently her stomach had performed a mutiny, declaring to her body that it was no longer under autoimmune control, that from now on it worked under its own fascist regime of purgatory, until every last liquid had been juiced out of each organ and removed with a painful cough of expulsion. Shaking profusely, Winry's arms gave out on her, her chin slamming against the bile-coated sink with a painful smack.

She didn't even have the strength to sigh. She didn't have the strength to do anything anymore. She clung there, incredibly helpless, as her body fought the urge to just give out completely. What was wrong with her... what the _fuck_ was wrong with her….

"I-I'm… not… a… alone…" the words protruded from her mouth unconsciously, hardly a hair of conviction behind them. "I'm n-not… alone…"

What the fuck was she doing? Here she was, clinging to the edge of a puke-spewed sink, hardly able to breathe without nearly losing all support from her skeletal system, and she was spewing nonsensical shit like this. Fucking—

"Winry? You home?"

The shock from hearing another human voice sent her hurtling to the ground, every bone and muscle located in her body officially surrendering to gravity and flaunting their newly achieved handicap status with idiotic pride. _Well_…

Looked like Granny Pinako was home.

"Winry?" her gruff voice graduated an octave, the vibration of her footsteps growing harsher against Winry's face as it lied deadly still atop the ground, unable to move, unable to mouth even a breath of a word, a syllable, a syllable of a syllable…

"Why does this house smell like a damned sewage plant—" her voice trailed off as she spotted Winry, pale and shaking on the ground, with her limbs uselessly splayed beside her. She could just barely make out her grandma's face as she knelt down before her, wrinkles of thick worry adding to its already wrinkly features. "Good lord…!"

"Gra… nny…" a violent convulsion sent her spine rippling chaotically against the floorboards, her body forcing out another spurt of bile that splattered lazily across Winry's mouth. Her skin gave a fierce twinge.

"You need bed, child," she spoke bluntly, a tinge of worry making her sound nastier than usual. "Can you stand up?"

Doubt made her feel nauseous all over again; her muscles seemed pretty comfortable in their new roles as worthless ropes of sinewy insignificance.

"Well?"

"Yes," defiance bubbled up inside her, unexpectedly fuelling her body into some state of emergency, spanking it into wakefulness and reminding it of some secret store of strength and mobility. Somehow, Winry was able to stand herself up (with significant help from the counter's reliable solidness, of course), the weight of the world and reality doing their best to keep her pinned pathetically to the ground. She was thankful when Granny Pinako put a supportive hand around her.

"I'm sorry," tears trickled sporadically down her face. "I'm so sorry."

"Stop yer 'pologizing child," Granny Pinako crowed, her hand plucking a trapped strand of hair out of a sticky glob of bile maiming the side of her face. "I've cleaned up much worse."

The old automail mechanic led Winry to a nearby chair, her age leaving her unable to support her any farther. Winry plopped into the chair clumsily, her muscles jumping at the chance to repossess their roles of supreme laziness before she had even properly positioned her ass on the seat. Her stomach reared in mild retaliation.

"Well?" Granny Pinako was eyeing the mess of ingredients on the counter, their powder-crusted coverings now plastered with an additional layer of puke. "I go on a trip fer several weeks, and you end up sick as a dog."

"Ed came back," Winry blurted the statement as if every answer in the world was crammed within it. She couldn't help it… it just seemed… she just _had_ to…

She watched as Granny Pinako's eyebrow shot up. "Did he?"

Winry gave a bashfully half-ass 'mhm', her eyes swerving to a spot on the floor far away from the old woman's (seemingly) all-seeing eyes. There was a moment of silence, a moment in which Winry could've sworn she heard the gears crustily turning in Granny Pinako's highly-experienced mind, creaking round and around…

"And fer how long've you been pukin' like this?" the question, so innocently structured, so masterfully crafted, managed to strike a nerve in Winry's body, making her heart thump faster than it probably should've been thumping at that moment.

"It… it started about three days ago."

Silence. Mortifying, gear-crunching silence.

"I think I might've just ate something—"

"When's it s'posed to come?" her question yanked Winry's eyes back onto her sternly creased face.

She had no idea how to answer her. "What do you…"

"Yer period."

Oh. That.

"… um… fairly soon…"

"Failry soon as in…"

"This week kinda soon," Winry swallowed a pillow of non-existent air. Did she dare? Did she dare ask the one-worded question, it was just Granny Pinako after all, it wasn't like her entire life would be yanked around and then flipped inside out by uttering that one simple, painfully simple question or anything…

"Why?" She did it. She said it.

But the stare down Granny Pinako was now giving her, eyes tiny slits of thoughtful speculation, bottom lip protruding out at a solicitous, pretentious angle… she wished she'd have just kept her big mouth shut.

"If somethin' weird about it happens," her glasses gave an impeccably timed glint. "You lemme know, you hear me?"

Winry was unable to nod in agreement.

"You understand me Winry?"

"Uhh, yes, yes Granny! I swear to you I will be sure to provide you with heavily detailed updates on the intricacies of my soon-to-be striking period!"

Why did she just say that? Why the _fuck_ did she just say something so incredibly stupid—

"I have to pee."

Winry was sprinting out of her seat in a matter of seconds, her feet propelling her to the bathroom at top-speed. Apparently her sickness had decided to act dormant, seeing as she suddenly had a lot more energy than she did a few seconds ago. Or maybe the epinephrine injected into her circulatory system after the 'interrogation of extreme awkwardness' was making her feel like a drugged track star. Either way, she wasn't about to start complaining.

But her eyes, they just couldn't help themselves. The mirror was calling out to them, toiling with their sensibility, manipulating them into rotating orbs of betrayal until they had absolutely no choice in the matter, they simply insisted, implored, _begged_ Winry to turn her head, just enough so that she could get a crystal clear view of that god-forsaken, sleep-deprived, puke-dimpled face.

She wouldn't allow it. Closing her eyes with an authoritative _hmph_, Winry snatched up the nearest towel and began the meticulous process of washing her face. After all, she couldn't _possibly_ allow herself to greet Ed with a revolting face full of chaffing, dehydrated puke blotches—

Al. She meant Al. Not Ed. Why would it matter if Ed saw her like that? It was _Al_ who hadn't seen her in forever, so obviously she had to put on her best, glowing face for him and most definitely not that jerk of a… of a…

She yanked down her shorts, underwear pulled right along with them, and ogled at their fluffy, perfectly unblemished lining with eyes dilated in panic. Nothing. No goopy ribbons of discharge. No bloody ovary tears waving up at her. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Clean as clean could be.

This most definitely had to be the first time she had EVER wanted her period to come. It just had to. She wouldn't allow it _not_ to. She'd go so far as to chug back a pint of beet juice while simultaneously punching herself in the stomach if that's what it took to give her damn ovaries the right idea. Because… if it didn't come…

If her period did decide to _not_ rear its big ugly head of underwear glazing blood, that would mean… that would surely mean… that she… Winry Rockbell, would be… would be…

"WINRYYYY!"

Would be… would be… with _his_…

"GET YOUR BUTT DOWN HERE AND SAY 'ELLO!"

"They're _here_?" Somewhere, a plug was popped out of place, draining every ounce of color from Winry's face. Fuck.

She went for the door, but instead nearly face planted as her shorts and underwear hung around her ankles. She pulled them up with a huff, her feet partaking on a noisy rampage towards the front door before she could even allow herself to finish her previous flood of highly dangerous, mind-blowing thoughts. Thank god she had at least had the decency to wipe off her face…

Peering around the corner with ridiculous ninja-like caution, Winry caught sight of Al, smiling and blabbering away as if the entire cheerfulness contained in the sun had been stuffed into him. Ooh, she just couldn't take it, the water show was already bubbling into its opening positions around the rims of her eyes, the stage fright dribbling to a point of uncontainable proportions, it was only a matter of moments before the curtains would go up and the tears would be released in a huge, sporadic chorus of face-reddening, cheek-soaking performance—

"AL!" Winry's voice cracked out in happiness, her throat still tender from her morning of purgatory, as she rushed up to the younger Elric brother and attacked him with a vicious glomp. "It's so good to see yo—"

A pair of insanely huge, super round black eyes were staring at her from behind Al's shoulder. Female eyes. And judging by the exotic flip of her lashes, the strikingly youthful glow of her porcelain skin…

A Xingese girl. Al was dating a Xingese girl.

"It's good to see you too Winry," a shockingly deep manly voice came from the boy she had always known to be young and pure. What had the world done to the sweet, chubby little Al?

"You might not remember her, but this is May," Al continued, the low throaty tone to his voice disturbingly foreign. "She wanted to come and see you guys too, so I figured you wouldn't mind…"

"It's cause she's Al's girlfriend!" Ed hollered at an unacceptably rude volume. He gave Al a hearty slap on the back, an action which, combined with the abrupt insolence of his comment, resulted in an offended Xiao Mei chomping down with murderous intentions on his hand, a relentless glint of pursuit in her eyes as she attempted to gnaw Ed's hand off once and for all.

Winry simply blinked, a few stray tears losing their balance and toppling from her eyes. "Al… May…" she locked the two of them within her gaze, their newly matured features a hazy blur as Winry blinked back mobs of tears. Her lips began to tremble, on the verge of bursting open and releasing wails of shrieking happiness. "You guys look so… mature."

"That's exactly what I said," Ed piped up, a scowl stretched across his face as he competed in a haughty staring contest with the thoroughly pissed panda. "And then I was ever so rudely attacked—"

"YOU CALLED ME AN OLD HAG!" May snapped, her and Xiao Mei both producing visible strands of electricity from their eyes as they glared Ed down.

"I SAID YOU LOOKED OLD DAMMIT!"

"THAT'S NOT WHAT XIAO MEI AND I HEARD!"

"I DON'T TRUST THAT FLEA-BITTEN THING'S JUDGEMENT!"

May gave an ear-deafening gasp, Xiao Mei copying her body language with silent perfection. "How… HOW COULD YOU?"

The doorway had suddenly been converted into a wrestling pen as the two (plus Xiao Mei) began a heated brawl; Winry and Al were quick to evacuate.

"They've been like this almost the whole way home," Al muttered apologetically. "I tried to stop them, but—"

"Your… your voice…" Winry could hardly remember how to use her vocal cords, they were being drowned out by the continuous flow of tears dribbling into the confines of her mouth. "Al, you've gotten so big! What happened to you? What happened to the little old Al I used to always play with and yell at and chase after?"

The blonde haired alchemist simply rubbed the back of his head in embarrassment. "You look a lot different too Winry." He chuckled a little before leaning in, his voice dropping to a low murmur (not that the brawlers in the background would've heard anyways). "Nii-san told me you'd gotten a lot prettier."

The tears literally evaporated right off her face as it heated up with blush. "I... he... AREYOUANDMAYGOINGOUT?" The words toppled out in a desperate attempt to divert his attention. She figured she had succeeded when she saw a speckle of blush begin to eat away at the whites of his cheeks.

"Well… I dunno…"

"Oh come on Al, you can tell Big Sister Winry!" she wiggled her eyebrows playfully, making sure to shoot Al a little wink of encouragement as she did so. "Just say yes or no…"

"Well…."

"YES OR NO AL. YES OR NO."

"H-How are you feeling… Winry?" his voice cracked under the heavy pressure of her stare; he was obviously trying to use the same tactic she had. What an amateur.

"Alphonse…" Winry's voice dropped to an incredibly sinister volume.

Al fidgeted a little before regaining the courage to look her in the eye. "No honestly Winry, how are you feeling?"

For a moment, Winry actually _did_ tune into the feelings of her body, and, surprisingly, nothing felt too wonky. "I'm perfectly fine now."

"That's not what Nii-san seemed to think," his eyes scoured her face with the analytical care of a concerned parent. "So May said she'd take a look at you. She's actually really good at helping people when they're sick."

A huge crash came from behind them. Hardly wanting to look, Winry glanced back to see Ed being squished to death under a pile of suitcases, May and Xiao Mei perched victoriously on the top.

"Honestly Ed," she rolled her eyes liberally. "You think you'd know how to treat a lady by now!" She went to kneel down, but instead felt her feet collapse beneath her, causing her to crumple to the ground in an unexpected bout of dizziness.

The sound of her name filling the room in a flourish of panicky wavelengths smacked against her skull, multiplying her dizziness and making it reproduce its nauseating grasp on her head as the world became blotted in shadow. It began eating her surroundings, moving on to devouring it as soon as it discovered the taste sensation of reality, the juicy, delectable goodness of ingesting it and replacing it with the soft, fuzzy appearance of black black nothingness, deep dark unconsciousness…

The last thing she could remember feeling was Ed's arms wrapping around her, supporting her head, her back, providing her with a warm, soft place to collapse as she escaped into the world of nothingness, a world swirling and brimming with the ethereal goodness of misty black blankness and painfully empty, beautifully vast isolation. She didn't even know what was real anymore. For all she knew, none of this was real, it had all been a dream, a dreadful attempt at dissociating from the pains of her sickness, of her secret, the secret that she knew she had but didn't want to ever ever admit to actually having, it would remain a secret forever and ever and ever and never pass the barrier of her lips. All she could do now was question. Question the world around her, the insanely crowded world of unconsciousness, what was real and what was simply a made up sensation. Questioning, after all, was the easiest way of forging obliviousness.

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><p><strong>AN: **So... I guess this makes me an AlxMay supporter? They are cute together... I dunno, their relationship just kinda seems natural. So are they together in this story? hmmm... I'LL LET YOU DECIDE! :3 And I've decided that writing about puking is a very fun task. Yes, I'm a freak, I know. And it was really fun to tease Al, he's just the perfect target for that kinda stuff! So anyways, what's up with Winry? Any guesses? I've had one so far... well, stay tuned for chapter 4, and I hope you enjoyed this chapter :D

As always I love to hear your thoughts on what's happening and what might happen next! All reviews/faves/watches/reads are greatly appreciated!`


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N:** And the story continues, with chapter 4! I've been getting lots of guesses as to what's up with Winry, and (despite my obvious hints) now you shall find out the truth behind her suffering. Enjoy! :)

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><p>A heavy gush of reality went careening through her throat, making Winry inhale and forget how to let it all go then exhale. The colors were so freaking bright—why were they so bright? They flashed and competed for her visual attention, each one seething in jealousy and flaring even brighter as she glanced aimlessly from side to side. She couldn't make out anything, everything just looked like big blazing blobs, all sense of lines and definition morphing into a swirly coagulation of blurred rainbow haze, kind of like a tricolored sorbet melting under the suffocating heat of the sun…<p>

A black and white figure pierced her vision, although it was too blurry to identify what it was. A piercing shriek seemed to come from its direction.

"Is she awake, Xiao Mei?" Such a soft, kind-sounding voice. So, so soft… and pretty…

A peaceful coolness suddenly blanketed her forehead. Winry looked up, the outline of what she assumed was the person with the soft voice right in front of her.

"Are you okay, Winry?" she spoke again, her words like a broken up, strangely paced lullaby that had absolutely no sense of rhythm. Yet still, it soothed.

And then, the acuity of reality hit her, freezing her eyeballs still as the highly defined burst of clarity gradually became less of a shock to her senses. May was in front of her, along with her lovable sidekick Xiao Mei. Both were looking at her with worry-strained eyes.

Her eyes felt like they had been pulled out of their sockets and then shoved back in the wrong way, leaving her dizzy and in a fitful state of crazed disorientation. "Where am I?" her voice was hardly even a croak.

"You're in your bedroom," May answered gently, her eyes scanning Winry's face for any hints of strain. "Ed and Al were just here, but they went to go make you some supper. We figured you probably fainted from going too long on an empty stomach."

Winry's mouth opened, attempting to form the sounds she wanted to say, but not a word made it out alive.

"Here," May reached over and tipped a glass full of water into Winry's mouth, the icy coldness of it making her mouth freeze up in rigid terror and dribble the majority of it all the way down her chin. The little droplets felt like miniature icicles hanging off her skin, just hanging there, unsure of how exactly to go about freezing into their classically shaped forms. They were swiftly removed by Xiao Mei's fuzzy little paw.

"Sorry about that," her cute Xingese voice rang in apology. "I'll just let you rest for a bit."

"No," Winry's voice cut through the sound barrier with groggy bluntness." Please… k-keep talking… your voice is nice."

A tiny smile formed atop her face. "Okay, if that's what you want me to do…"

Winry listened intently as May explained her journey with Al, her ears shivering in pleasure as they were kissed by the gentle vibrations of May's voice. Baby steps—little, tiny baby steps was all it took, all that was needed to awaken Winry's eardrums into a state of realigned certainty.

"And I swear, when I first got here—" May's voice suddenly shrunk back, as if regretting that it had even revealed the beginning of such a thought. "I… I felt an unexpected presence."

"Like what?" Winry's voice came out even and strong now, having had the chance to rest and use May's voice as a sort of remindful role-model.

"Like…" the girl exchanged looks with Xiao Mei, her eyes giving a dilated gasp before shrinking back to normal. "… like a… baby's presence."

The washcloth on Winry's forehead slipped a little. "Well that's… strange."

"I thought that at first too," May's voice undoubtedly went up a notch. "But then I realized something, something that I probably shouldn't have realized but I ended up realizing anyways, and, and, and by then, well, it was just too late, I-I couldn't make myself forget what I had just realized—"

Winry's eyelids sank deep into her eye sockets, tucking themselves safely away from even the teensiest photon of light. "What did you realize?"

May's endless parade of words came to a catastrophically silent end, halting mid-beat in the air and falling to an abysmal place of death that words of half-spoken measure surely went. Her eyes shifted slightly, as if burdened by unwanted images of dramatic irony. "I realized that the feeling originated from you."

A hideously pitchy laugh overtook the room, the velocity of it nearly chucking Winry's vocal cords right out of her throat. "That's hilarious! Obviously I'm not a _baby_…!" she continued to laugh herself into a state of paralyzing anxiety.

"I know that!" May's voice was thickly seasoned in disgust. "The source of the presence was coming from _within_ you!"

Winry's artificial showcase of laughter came to an abrupt halt. "Say… that… again?"

"I said the baby's presence was coming from within you."

The washcloth flopped limply onto the bed. "Can you please repeat that in English?"

May took a deep breath, her mouth sucking in more air than she could seemingly pack into her tiny little lungs. She made her way close to Winry, both her hand and Xiao Mei's paw resting delicately atop her own shuddering knuckles. She wasn't ready for this. She wasn't ready for this…

"You're having a baby, Winry."

Words drowned her brain in a pool of linguistic muddle. She didn't understand any of them. She didn't understand anything. Nothing. It was all nonsensical, strangely shaped compositions of matter, a unique package of gravity, thrust, drag, all of those beautiful physical forces acting on tightly-packed packages of beautifully vibrating, beautifully constructed solids. The resistance of her mind generated ohms, pesky little ohms, that scraped the sides of her brain, barricading the news from settling, giving birth to coulombs of heavily charged anger, electrocuting her mind into stupefied resistance. She had ignored the laws of life, of life's actions and reactions, she had blown right past it and given in to an energy source that she'd never researched, never harnessed, never tamed and transformed into an appropriate form of effective output before, she had simply given in to its pleasurable itch, that itch that felt insanely disturbing and invasively prickly yet, simultaneously, was rather luscious and sweet, like honey, electricity soaked honey, or perhaps honey high off electricity, fuck it didn't even matter, it had all been so exotically liberating at the time, she—

She should've known. She should've damn well known. For every action there was an equal and opposite reaction… for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction… for every action there was an equal and opposite reaction… for every sexual action there was a life-altering consequence of attraction. Ha ha ha... physics... _god_, she... she loved physics. She fucking loved it.

"Congratulations!"

The word bounced right off her skull. Her senses weren't functioning. They had traded places during a moment of complete, utterly horror-stricken panic, during which Winry could see aromas and visualize odours, hear the blankets patting her into a position of warmth, feel the sound of her heart whispering to her, of her organs informing her, squealing to her, yelling at her, screaming at her the news, the news that her body was now encapsulating another body, was now providing life to another living, breathing thing, it was just this thing growing inside of her, it was screaming and wiggling and tugging at her blood vessels, tying them into mounds of knots that left her aching and screaming for life, screaming for life at a time when she couldn't even hear her own voice, feel her own feelings, smell her own fear or see her own anxiety, she couldn't do a fucking thing about any of this fucking fact of a lie—

Winry's face became scarily blank. "I don't believe you. I-I don't believe you."

"But your hormones told me so," May's cute little voice suddenly sounded unnervingly bitchy. "They're a lot like reading the flow of the Dragon's Pulse, or the flow of the earth; if you just listen, they'll tell you all their secrets…"

She wasn't ready for this. Winry wasn't ready for this. She wasn't ready to be a parent. She wasn't ready to give birth. She wasn't ready to tell him… to tell him… she wasn't ready. She wasn't fucking ready. What kind of a fucking joke was God playing on her anyways, throwing her into the world of fucking parenthood like this, it just wasn't fair, it wasn't fair, it wasn't fucking fair—

The tears came explosively, streaming from her eyes and flooding her mouth with their intoxicating tang, ripping her face right off with their sheer intensity, burning her skin with their rage and sorrow and bliss, corroding it into this mangled expression of cripplingly confused perplexity, of a shock that her face was too delicate and too young to properly express and emote, too naïve to recognize the terrifying beauty blooming within her, nestling into the fields of bloody nourishment provided by her uterus, she just couldn't control the tears, couldn't control the shock that was electrocuting her body into an inconsolable tantrum of indescribable components, they just dripped and dripped and dripped…

"Winry?"

The softness in her voice was back. It was almost mother-like... heavenly…

"It's gonna be okay," May smiled, obviously trying her best to calm the new mother before her. "I think you'll make a great mother."

"No…" her voice trembled morosely, "No… no… I can't…"

"Winry," May spoke with a seriousness that caught Winry off guard, causing her to look the Xingese girl straight in the eyes and feed off the strength and support that seemed so far beyond her years. "You _will _make a wonderful mother."

Winry mopped up her tears with the back of her hand, her face stinging madly. "Okay."

"Now, why don't we go eat some supper? You have two bodies to feed now, so it's important to stay nourished, right?"

Two bodies. Two. She went to stand up, her body shaking from the potency of the truth that had slapped her in the face and skinned her alive, leaving her raw and naked to the blunt blows of reality. As she hobbled towards the door, May's hands guiding her in the appropriate direction, the significance of that word, that one word, a word one normally utters without even a neurological twinge of thought, making her lose all sense of stability. How could she maintain a normal sense of equilibrium when she had another person_ inside_ her? How was she supposed to calm down a crying infant when she couldn't even calm down her own psychotically melting mind?

Shuffling dazedly into the kitchen, Winry nearly flinched and curled into a tiny indestructible ball; she hadn't prepared herself to look at him yet. Not yet.

"Winry, you're awake!" Al's cheerful voice coated the room in its sound waves of honey. "How are you feeling?"

The question was innocent enough. In fact it was so innocent, it pissed Winry off. Al didn't have to be the carrier of a growing human being. He had no idea. No fucking idea how un-okay she was. "I'm fine now."

"Thank goodness! I swear, if you'd have been unconscious any longer, Nii-san would've—"

Ed's arm swiftly coiled around Al's neck, squeezing him silent like some hot-headed cobra going in for an unnecessary kill. "Al made you soup."

The impeccable display of kindness, all for the sake of her and the unknown entity metamorphing inside her, was making her heart repel its own blood; breathing seemed like such a tedious, mechanical process now, seeing as she had to do it for _two_ people all of the sudden, her heart just felt so confused, questioning every beat and every pump, every diastolic gasp and every systolic shrivel, it didn't know anymore what was considered enough and what was considered inadequate, how was it supposed to know anyways, it hadn't been expecting to oxygenize another pair of lungs, no one had been kind enough to inform it of this change in job expectations…

She was sitting down now. She didn't recall ever sitting down. When had she sat down?

"Don't force yourself Winry," May comforted softly. "Al won't be offended if you don't eat his canned soup creation."

"Hey!"

Under normal circumstances, she probably would've laughed. She probably would've joined right in the festiveness of the dinner table, teasing Al till he turned all red and embarrassed and yelling at Ed not to take so many pieces of bread before he'd even tasted the main dish. But that was before she had been deemed a 'new mother'. That was all before she had been told to double everything and take extra good care of something she couldn't even see or sense in her uterus, before she had decided to give in to the seductive embrace of the unknown and inadvertently change the very course of her fucking life. It was all _before_. Kind of like the silvery shininess that winked at you while you drilled the screw into the automail, you just knew it wouldn't last, knew it wouldn't maintain that attractive glimmer that sold you into buying it in the first place, you just knew the shininess was too god damn perfect to last forever, it was just asking,_ begging_ for someone to come and scratch its stellar, reputable purity—

Something was stabbing her. Tiny golden needles were pricking at her conscience, fastening her to the spot so that she could be analyzed and poked like a pin cushion specimen. Her heart suffered a terrifying span of amnesia as she realized it was Ed's golden eyes pinning her down, placing her in his visionary spotlight with the riveting power of his unfairly alluring eyes. Winry yanked her gaze down towards her soup; he knew. He knew something was wrong. His eyes had that hard look of concern, like looking into a jar of frozen honey, you just knew something was wrong, that something was out of place. The staring contest taking place between her real eyes and her reflective soup eyes had suddenly taken a very intense turn.

"Winry," Ed's voice scored right through the trivial chatter of the dinner table. "Can I talk to you for a second?"

She stared at her soup. It looked pretty, all dressed up in its translucent hue of red and bedazzled with chunks of lopsided vegetables. So pretty.

A pat on the shoulder from Xiao Mei brought her back to semi-reality. May was shooting her a look of meek encouragement.

"S-Sure," she stood up stiffly, eyes still glued to the murky soup mirror. The screaming of the chair legs against the wooden floorboards sounded quickly across from her.

She couldn't do this. She wasn't ready to ruin his life like this. She wasn't ready for any of this. Her heart entered a temporary state of comatose as she walked towards her room, unavailable to prescribe her any dosages of serotonin, anything that might keep her ever so slightly balanced on the ledge dividing panic and composure. The sound of his footsteps behind her, so heavy in obliviousness, only lodged the moment deeper into the cracks of time, isolating them both from the real-time flow of the world around them…

Her bedroom window loomed before her. She had never known it to be so big and daunting. But that was nothing compared to the overwhelming presence now standing behind her. Winry waited for the silence to end, wishing it never ever would, that it would continue on and on into a beautiful melody of nothingness…

"Are you okay?"

The question was simple enough. Direct, but it still had manipulative potential.

She hastily flipped around, her feet tripping over themselves as she finally came to a steadfast position before him. "I'm fine! I feel 100% better than I did before you left, it's amazing what a little bed rest can do for a person, ehh—"

"Like hell you do Winry," his words were outlined in daggers. "Do you honestly think I'm that fucking dense—"

"Well you asked, okay?" a tremor of hurt punctured her voice. "I'm fine."

Ed's face became infected with shadow. "I thought you weren't a liar."

"Ed don't do this to me—"

"Then just tell me what the fuck's wrong with you Winry!"

The room cowered in silence. A ringing, head-throbbing silence. The tears sprouted from her eyes with uncontrollable momentum, shoving and overcrowding at the fringe of her eyelashes till they all tumbled out in one big cathartic throng, deckling her cheeks in their impatient, hot-headed madness. It wasn't fair…

"You wanna know the truth, Ed?" Winry breathed, her voice hardly even loud enough to be considered a whisper. "I… I'm…"

The air sliding through her throat suddenly became jagged and splintered, piercing her breaths into a few dicey gasps before she regained her ability to breathe again. She took a shaky step towards Ed, until her feet finally just gave out and she collapsed right into his chest, her wet eyes greedily transferring tears all over his shirt as she felt his arms encompass her back with just the right amount of strength. She let an oxygen-deprived sigh, shaky and scared, slip from her mouth, her lips caressing his shirt as they tried to turn thoughts into words. "I'm n-n-not fine."

His mouth nestled intimately against her forehead, nuzzling the area of her face where skin gave way to hair. "Tell me more."

Her fingers clenched the back of his shirt with an avaricious tug. "I-I… I missed my period. It was supposed to come two days ago, but it didn't. It didn't come Ed. I didn't even tell Granny Pinako, and she asked me, she asked me to tell her if it never came and I lied to her, I just couldn't handle the ridiculously easy task of telling her, I just couldn't, and then May, she, she, I-I didn't…"

"Winry," his mouth was warm against her skin, her body feeling her name more so than hearing it. "Just tell me."

Her shoulders gave a few spastic heaves, plastering her mouth in a layer of sticky, melty tears. "It's… it's r-really difficult though…"

"I'm sure I can handle it."

She couldn't help but feel relieved at that. Why could Ed always make such difficult things seem so ridiculously simple? His words buffered her acidic worries copiously. "You're gonna make such a good one."

"Huh?" his mouth moved away from her forehead, making Winry look up pensively into his eyes, his confused, totally uncomprehending eyes of sweet sweet golden goodness, filling them with this soft, delicate strength she had no idea even existed within her body, it just rose up and showered out of her in this affectionate, maternal sort of way…

"A father."

She watched his eyes grow wide, their golden irises blooming into a magnificently shocked state of paralysis as the immense gravity of what she'd just said bombed down on him, showering him in the debris of confused disbelief that inevitably must've come with it. "W-Winry…"

She smiled, though the energy of it ended up making her lips quiver, they quivered until her entire mouth was shaking, until she couldn't contain the emotions brewing inside of her any longer; a monsoon of tears came pelting out of her eyes. "I-I-I-I'm so s-s-s-sorry! I'm s-s-so s-s-s-sorry—"

Amidst the torrential pounding of her tears against his shirt, Winry heard Ed laugh a little; just a little, like one of those laughs that aren't actually a laugh, but one laughs anyway because there's no better way to react, things are just so fucking hard to believe that laughing converts the shock into something lighter, something that thinks not being able to wrap your head around a situation is incredibly hilarious in an incredibly non-hilarious kind of way. But instead of blowing up at her, or maybe even just walking away from it all and proclaiming to have nothing to do with the mess of a miracle they'd created, that they created with their very own unique assembly of genes and DNA and alleles of all different shapes and lengths and colors—instead, he looked deep into her eyes, delved into them like a newly opened tub of ice cream, of bubblegum ice cream, eating up all that unnaturally blue, blue deliciousness that seemed to lack any bubblegum, any texture. He looked deep into Winry, and, although she could see the fear gripping his soul right through his unblinking eyes, she noticed a flicker of pride.

"You're amazing… you know that?" Ed's voice was strangely high-pitched, as if on the verge of breaking down in a very unmanly way. "This is the second time you've managed to do something no other alchemist has ever been able to do."

Her face twitched in surprise. "You mean… you're not… you're not…" she started tearing up again before she could complete her sentence.

"Hey, hey, before you give my shirt a complete washing here," his voice was soft, perfectly replicating the subtle way he brushed her tears away with his hand. "I-I… have something difficult to tell you too."

Winry gave a big, sinus-distressing snivel. "What?"

Ed's face started to turn red, the intensity of the redness growing progressively more intense as he diverted his gaze away from her, mouth coiling up into that stern, sideways scowl. "Well, I mean, it's not really as difficult as what you had to say, but it's still pretty difficult for a guy like me to say, so even despite the difference in difficulty it's still pretty f-ing difficult for me—"

"Just say it, dumbass."

The end of his mouth gave a perturbed twitch, his face deepening to its most exquisite shade of red yet. "I… I love you."

She wished he hadn't said it. Her body hadn't been ready for it. Not then. It began rejecting the statement almost as soon as the ethereal context of the words had choked her cochlea into a state of shuddering hysteria, obliterating her senses and returning them to a position of toddler-like simplicity. Her body didn't want to hear it. It didn't want to hear it, because that would just make it worse, it would all be worse, it would all be harder than ever to take out that game, that game of waiting, and play it with the patience she had inexhaustibly exhibited before she'd exhausted the inexhaustible. Yet at the same time, her heart was swelling up, becoming puffy and inflamed as indescribable happiness punctured it like some deadly allergen, but an allergen she had waited all her life to contract, one she'd dreamed and fantasized about over and over again, the reaction was rendering her body numb and jittery, she couldn't hold back now, she needed that antidote, that life-saving touch, she was so dreadfully dreadfully close…

His lips pressed into hers with amorous strength, leaving Winry breathless and with no other choice but to surrender to his loving embrace. Her body seized up in delicious coma-like lassitude, the only thing able to move her tear-glossed lips as she fondled Ed's lower lip affectionately. Tears continued streaming from her eyes, inching their way down into their mouths, lubricating their lips till they tasted like the most delicious, body-warmed salt you could ever imagine. All Winry could do was stand there, on tiptoe, pressing her body further and further into his treacherous embrace, the embrace that would send her down a spirally slide of bedazzlement and unintentional malfunction, it had done it before, surely it was going to do it again, she just kept pressing and pressing till her breasts pushed flat against his chest, firm and erect, she wanted to feel and taste every inch of him, never letting go, always kissing, always touching, always spooning him into an inescapable position of yearning elation, she wanted Ed to crave her body the way she craved his, and she could tell, she could tell now that he did crave it, they were in love, they were in love and nothing apart from his soft, caressing lips, skilfully tugging hers into his mouth, could calm her quite right, could make her feel like problems were nothing but fables, nothing but legends…

They separated with sticky unwillingness, their peeling away from each other like skin torn away, cell by cell, from a prickly sheet of frosty metal; Winry's eyes gazed up into Ed's, his golden irises melting her ligaments into an even greater state of indolence, petrifying them into fried bits of crispy, tingly muscle that mocked the appearance of bacon. Somehow, his eyes always made the games seem easier. The game of waiting. The game of love. The game of life. They were like that lucky tumble of the dice you'd been waiting all game for, that one roll that would win you the game, that would bring everything to a triumphant, victorious halt and send the game and all its geographical bumps and dips into an abysmal place of triviality, into a world that simply neglected the hardships and struggles that had been endured in order to even get to that point. Somehow, Ed could just do that for her.

"Let's go," Ed's words coated her ears in sugary softness. "Al and everyone's waiting."

"Okay."

Pressing her lips into Ed's one last time, Winry stretched the moment for as long as possible, savouring their precious time together, never ever wanting it to end despite knowing it was about to at any second. They parted reluctantly, their eyes giving an unenthusiastic glimmer as Ed took Winry's hand into his, its guidance enveloping her and giving her the strength, the mental capability she needed, to take her first step onto the starting square of her newest waiting game.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **Okay, cookies for everyone who guessed Winry was pregnant! 8D And if you didn't... then pay more attention in sex ed class! Anyways, this chapter was very interesting for me to write... it often left me very tired out and shaky, and I tried SO damn hard to create the perfect balance of chaotic psychological overload (for both Winry and the readers). Oh, and I actually despire of physics, it's my worst subject in science, but, since a) I had just slavishly studied it for my science final and b) Winry must be knowledgeable of it in order to be an automail mechanic, I braced myself and put my (limited) physics knowledge to the creative test. It was fun, surprisingly. I always adore mixing science with the arts of writing. And oi, some trivia here! Anyone know what physics law Winry was repetively saying to herself? HINT: Newton coined it. Yay for science nerds!

Okay I'll sthu now, keep staying tuned for chapter 5 everyone! And thank you so much for your incredible support and reviews, they seriously make me wanna cry :'D


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N: **FINALLY... chapter 5 has arrived. I apologize TERRIBLY for the long delay, I felt so bad. I was suffering from some really bad depression and insomnia while trying to write this chapter, so things were extremely difficult for me. I hope it turned out though. Please enjoy as much as you can, if that's at all possible. If it atones for my procrastination at all, this chapter is longer then the others ;)

Notes:

~chan: Japanese name suffix usually used for little girls, young children, or with pets. Signifies closeness.

~oneesan: Japanese name suffix that means either 'big sister' or is simply a term used by young children to refer to females who are older then them.

And I just wanted to say, this story is dedicated to my best friend Amilee. She helped me during a time of depression when it seemed as if life was no longer worth living. She gave me meaning, and I am forever in her debt. Not to mention she helped me A TON with this chapter! Thank you so much Amilee... you really are the greatest person ever, and I am so lucky to have met you. *end of sappiness*

* * *

><p><em>... drip<em>

_... drip... drip... _

_... drip..._

_Her eyes opened abruptly, expecting to see something, expecting to rouse the rods and ruffle the cones into hopeless activation..._

_But there was nothing. She could see absolutely nothing. _

_Mildly irritated, Winry adjusted her position in bed, the sheets fidgeting around her and the bed-frame childishly whining at her jerky movements. She closed her eyes, the night-bathed world being replaced by the warm, blood vessel laced covers of her eyelids. _

_... drip..._

_... drip... drip... drip... drip..._

_A sticky blob of liquid dripped atop her cheek. Again, she was forced to open her eyes, her hand absently wiping away the viscous little bead of liquid as she lifted herself to a lazy sitting position. _

_She looked up. The roof glared back at her, defiantly reprimanding her for even daring to suggest that it had disrupted her precious beauty sleep. She was sure though... despite the flawless expanse of ceiling cascading into a sea of smooth, rippling roofing above her... it was leaking._

_As if to fortify her evidence-less hypothesis, another mystery droplet plummeted into the opening of her eye, the pupil, the black hole of her body, blotting her retina into panicked refuge. Reeling, Winry clenched her eye, a muggy film of liquid painting her hand a deep color of the night._

"_God dam—"_

_Her spine stiffened, pinching her discs into obediently pressured packets of immobilized tissue. Someone was crying. A baby. A baby was crying. A baby... her baby..._

"_Don't..." instinctively she felt herself stand up, the magnetic field produced by the infant's cry directing her, with thoughtless alarm, towards the source of the disturbance. _

_The cool floors of the hallway kissed Winry's feet, sending them into a rapturous tingle that made her want to collapse and sleep forever. Her body clock was ticking, on and on, tick tick, ticking her a lullaby, trying its best to soothe her into a worriless state of drowsiness, of sleepy manipulation, the haze of noxious tire quickly obliterating her lamely functioning vision. She stumbled against the wall, the shrill piercing of the baby's wail overpowering her body's fascist commands of sleep. _

"_Don't... cry..." a door bloomed before her, she had never known a door to be there, but there was, it was muffling the sound of the cries, guarding the child that so helplessly screamed out into the night for a comforting touch of reassurance, the vocabulary of maternal body language. Opening the door, slowly, sluggishly, eliciting from its depths a delicious screech that made the blood dance about in rhythm-dazed fear, a muggy film of heat polluted the air, asphyxiating the coolness previously caressing her face with its unfelt touch, pressing her eyes shut till her eyelashes sucked at her skin like gloopy, feathered leeches. _

_A crib, its white frame eerily luminescent beneath the skin of night, stood in the distance, everything around it coated in thick, luxuriously impenetrable blackness. The crying had escalated to a cacophonous wailing now, ripping apart air molecules and causing sound waves to dissociate into malignant spindles of transverseless frequency, it was so pitiably terrifying, listening to this creature shake sound into such a confused state—_

_It stopped. The wailing had stopped. The room sat in silence for a moment, adapting to its newfound serenity, when suddenly, the baby's voice made its return, avenging the previous span of silence with the spluttering sounds of choking and gagging, it was as if the entire Milky Way had poured its milky star shine into its tiny, hardly formed lungs, forcing them to struggle and retaliate under circumstances where organ reprisal was quite simply futile, if not impossible._

"_My baby!" Winry shrieked, her body rushing over to the spluttering infant's side with anxiety-stimulated speed. She threw herself over the edge of the crib, its wooden features digging into her ribs with stoic rebellion as her eyes madly, frantically scoured its depths. "Don't cry—" _

_Her voice abandoned her as she realized there was no baby in the crib. Instead, a mirror of blood spanned below her, licking the crib with its tongue of salty grime, cracking and oozing till the mirror became a pool, became a lake, completely transforming the crib into a basin of blood, a sea of blood, a world of blood, the cracks just kept weeping and weeping this never ending stream of it, it swelled till it crept over the edges, through the bars, past the wooden frame and seeped into the floor, staining it in that murky color of warm, runny ruby, ruby scarred by a hint of bodily black. _

_Winry didn't know if she was screaming, she couldn't tell, the sound of the blood filling her baby's lungs like an overblown balloon, on the verge of exploding, on the edge of bursting, it was filling her ears with treacherous decibels of shrieking and shivering, she couldn't hear anything except her baby, drowning amidst the torrential uprising of this foreign rush of blood—_

_She threw her hands into the blood bath, her fingers threading through its swampy contents till it dotted her arms like splattered blotches of bloody molasses. Groping and grasping and fondling, Winry fingered every area of the crib she could, creating chaotic ripples that skated across the weeping mirror's surface, a dizzying collision of blood rings fracturing it into this never-ending, always snivelling surface that had no beginning or end, but she felt nothing, no squirming hands, no kicking legs, nothing. She lifted her hands from out of the crib, their features glimmering in blood-laced gauntlets, shaking and clenching at nothing, no flesh, no living being. _

"_M-My... b-b-baby... my..." words came with an artificial naturalness, spewing from her mouth almost as freely as the blood welling up from the crib, she could feel the saliva collecting at the tip of her tongue, embracing her taste buds in its insipid slime, it just continued to collect and devour her mouth till it began dribbling over her lips, down her chin, skydiving into the perilous canyons of the world, the bloody blood covered world..._

_Blood squishing up between her toes, Winry looked down, coughing slightly as the drool continued to stream from her mouth, it wouldn't stop, her glands were being overpowered by their very own product, it numbed them and rendered them incapable, it just kept flowing and streaming and swerving, down, down, down, drip, drip, drip..._

_A violent cough racked her windpipe, sending saliva splattering out of her mouth in massive bursts, like firecrackers that didn't quite pop right, stringy gobs of spit swinging from her chin and clinging to her like living strips of cobweb. Weakly she covered her mouth, the coughing continuing to batter her throat till she was forced to her knees, the blood greeting her with an appalled, heavy splash, the coughing just went on and on till it had become a tune, a tune of distress and breathing difficulties and—_

_Her hand... she lifted it off her mouth, and... it was covered in blood. Blood. It was _her_ blood. Her..._

_She looked down, watching as teensy jewels of blood went drip, drip, drip, right into the heavenly habitat of erythrocytic takeover, right out of her mouth, slinking from the curves of her lips to the chill of the floor, it just kept dripping and dripping, dripping and dripping..._

_Another string of coughs attacked Winry's body, heaving her onto her hands and knees and whipping her body into a convulsive, boney mess. Blood flew from her mouth, large clumps all adhesively clinging to one another, it gushed up her throat and slid past her teeth and filled her mouth till she had no other choice but to expel it with a spine-shifting retch. She coughed and coughed and coughed, the sound of her baby's choking growing fainter and fainter, but she couldn't stop the coughing, every time she emptied her mouth another uprising of blood would rush back in, filling it till her teeth prickled and the roof of her mouth retracted, she kept coughing and coughing and coughing, all the blood in her body going directly into the blood saturating the room, the blood covering her baby, killing her baby, she was killing her baby, her baby was choking, choking on the very blood that was supposed to be giving it life, this wasn't right, she had to stop coughing, why couldn't she just stop coughing— _

"Yo, automail freak."

Reality body-slammed her into a spluttering stance of wakefulness.

"Is there a reason you're invading _my_ half of the bed?"

Winry looked over, successfully murdering her barely functioning vision as her nose came within a hair's length of Ed's; her face became an elegant showcase of blush. "No!"

She flipped over haughtily, yanking the covers across her face until she was smothered in an impermeable fortress of bed sheets. The tears began bullying her eyes with unfair, unwanted brutality, forcing them to smother her face in their liquid wails.

"Oi, Winry..." his voice was stifled by the blanket's armor. "I was kidding you know, I couldn't give two shits if you wanna snuggle up to me in the middle of the night—"

The pressure of his hand, so light yet so compressingly crushing against her back, sent her spine repelling his touch with a violent flinch.

"Is something wrong?" Ed's voice was steeped in confusion. Winry only pulled the covers tighter around her face, wanting nothing more than to choke her senses into a world of reality-less euphoria.

A counterattack of vicious retaliation ripped the covers right off of her cowering face. "Come on Winry, quit acting like such a—"

The cover thief was quickly interrupted as Winry suddenly threw herself at him, pinning him against his pillow in a state of regretful vulnerability. Her prey, however, had grabbed hold of her wrists before she could pummel him any further into the mattress, holding her high enough off his body till her breasts swung at an enticing altitude, one where he most likely had an unrivalled 360 degree view of her womanly scenery. His mouth twisted into a delighted smirk. "You wanna go?"

Winry stared into his eyes, deeply, intimately, their watery creations slipping into the jaws of gravity before erupting atop Ed's bare chest, artfully shattering into blobs of blossoming wetness, tattoos that could never hold their shape yet tried to anyways, yearning to be permanent, attempting to be real. "Ed..."

She collapsed brilliantly onto his chest, her face burrowing into the warm caverns of his skin, nuzzling its way deeper and deeper into his calming warmth, the tears smushing and rubbing against her cheeks, her forehead, her eyelids, smouldering like smoky hot friction laced in ice. Somehow her eyes knew, they just knew instinctively, that it was okay to spill their secrets into the safety of Ed's chest.

"There's something wrong Ed," Winry's voice shivered, chilled by all the tears leaching the warmth from her body. "There's something... wrong..." her sentence was punctuated by a fresh insertion of teary gasps.

Arms ribboning around her shoulder blades, Winry felt Ed hold her close. "Do you want me to carry you to the toilet?"

She shook her head meekly. "It's not that."

"You sure?"

"Mhm."

"Then," her body was forced backwards, butt awkwardly making contact with the curves of Ed's legs as his hands sat her up. "I think I know what'll make you feel better."

Barely having a chance to vine her arms around his neck, Winry was gently lifted into Ed's arms, his feet leading them towards the balcony door of her room. "Where are we going?

He gave the door an apathetic kick, its hinges squealing in appalled disruption as it gave way to night world territory. "Dunno."

"You do to!" The crisp breath of midnight snaked across her face, flirtatiously flinging her hair and threading through her eyelashes like a serpent of interstitial night-time suave. "This is _no way_ to treat a beautiful pregnant woman—"

She was placed on her feet with rapid caution, left to gawk as Ed manoeuvred his way up onto the slope of the roof, his ponytail shimmering a mischievous glint of moonlit amber as it tumbled lightly atop the breeze. He knelt down, extending a hand towards her. "Come on."

She shot him an incredulous look. "Do you honestly expect me to crawl up there like you just did?"

"Uh, yeah."

Despite a highly unimpressed 'hmph' slipping from her mouth, Winry placed her hand into Ed's; swiftly, she felt her metatarsals levitate from the security of the ground, dragging the tips of her toes away from the porch and forcing her to squirm her way onto the scratchy roof. One final yank from Ed successfully scraped her boobs all the way to beside his torso, leaving her feet dangling perilously over the edge and her skin retracting, attempting in its own practically useless way to erase the sensation of being dragged across splintery shingles. "Happy?"

Grinning, he assisted her in finding a comfortable spot to sit, the rough surface of the roof grating Winry's butt as she balanced gingerly atop the hobbly platform of a shingle (one that didn't stick up her butt too much with every breath she took). "Is this a habit of yours or something?"

"Nah," Ed gazed up at the vast landscape stretched above them, beyond them, his eyes absorbing its endless expanse, like two golden spheres of solvent trying to dissociate the galaxy into its unknown elements. "Al's the one who started it."

Winry tilted her head back, the tips of her hair smashing into the miniscule thorns of slivers sprouting out of the roof's weathered complexion; the richness of the heavens, the cheeriness of the stars, unsurpassed in brilliance except when competing with the moon, really was like a peaceful visual bath, a massage for the humors as the retina shifted into night-time sensory.

"You had a nightmare, didn't you?"

The suddenness of his voice took her off-guard, piercing her dream bank and stirring vivid memories of things that shouldn't have been remembered, of things covered and reeking in the vague cologne of blood. "H-How did you know?"

Her answer was a rather discourteous laugh. "Who was it now who'd _always_ come sneaking into my room, whining 'Ed, Ed I can't get to sleep 'cause I had a really scary dream!' when we were younger?"

"I did not—"

"And then you'd come snuggle up to me in bed, just like you did tonight—"

"You are such a dirty little liar!" Winry countered, thoroughly appalled at his twists in childhood history. "A-And even if I did sneak into your room sometimes, _who_ was the one who'd always just say 'Oh shut up Winry!' and throw a pillow at my face?"

Snickering. He was _snickering_.

"Hey—"

"You still don't get it, do you?" Ed shot her a saucy glance. The thought that he was purposely toiling with her ego, just kneading it around like some overworked mound of dough, dough that, once upon a time, had been very very fluffy, and light, but was now spoiled and torn and... it was maddening. Pleasurably maddening.

"Explain yourself, Mr. Elric, before I personally assist you in your departure from this roof." Her mouth formed a taut line.

"Obviously," Ed began, voice ringing out in self-decided victory, "My throwing the pillow in your face was a sure-fire way of pissing you off, enough to make you forget all about your 'scary dream'."

Her brain purposely chose to reject his words, for fear of being thrown into a glucose-coated coma. "Are you... serious?" For a split-second, she actually, truly, genuinely, believed him. She wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe and intellectually roll around in the thought of Ed actually caring enough to try and help her, scared little Winry, in his own naive, thoughtlessly thoughtful, childishly rude way.

And then, she saw his face.

Before she could even initiate the signal to open her mouth, Ed had combusted into a highly rude, hysterically unacceptable laughing fit, complete with spit spraying and mocking side glances.

"Like hell I did that!" his face had been overtaken by a devilish smirk. "I just wanted you to get the hell outta my room!"

Oh, how she wished she had her wrench. She wanted nothing more than to shatter open his skull, make him experience cerebral suffering that would atone for his childish crimes of making a poor, suffering little girl, her angelic younger self, endure such treacherous treatment of the psyche.

"Edward Elric... you are such a little—"

"But you can tell me about your dreams now... I mean, uh, if you... want," he cast his head to the side, hair gliding over his shoulder as it distracted from his reddening face.

A lump of emotion pressed at the walls of her throat, enflaming it and puncturing it with their blissful upsurge of destabilizing potency, hushing her voice box into an abandoned chest of potential, a sleeping bed of conversion that had no intentions of being stressed into interpreting and translating the unexpected purgatory of the heart, the whispering words of the hormones. Desiring contact, a feeling of undeniable connection, Winry wiggled her way closer to Ed, the scraggly scrape of the roof irrelevant compared to her need to eradicate that anxiety, that phobia of closeness, of physical entrenchment—

Delicately, she let her head rest atop Ed's shoulder, her heart stamping outlines of her ribs into its spastic exterior, so excited and afraid. It felt nice, it felt so incredibly nice, just being connected like that, hanging, dangling in the abysmal cracks of time, the ones that seemed to evade their nightly camouflage and more readily show themselves, let themselves be captured, in the lonely hours of morning.

And then, this burst of trepidation yanked at her heart, catalyzing it into this struggling mound of muscle that had forgotten everything, forgotten how to beat and how to hide it's safely stowed secrets; she lifted her head off his shoulder quickly, that action seeming to be the only capable resolution to her heart's amnesia.

She sat there, petrified, eternally trapped in a state of systolic hyperventilation. What was she doing? Wasn't she allowed now to do this kinda stuff? Their creation was only growing inside of her for god's sake, what was she so... so...

"Dammit Winry." The side of her head was immediately pushed back down, reuniting her cheek with the slope of his shoulder. It fit there perfectly. It was like a key, a key that had known since birth, since before birth, that it had belonged there, and had been waiting ever since to be put to eternal rest there. What the hell...

"Hey, Ed?" Winry's voice came out quieter than she'd meant it to. "You think our parents are watching us?"

A beat went by, a moment for the sky to catch its breath and continue on with its galactic merry-go-round maturation. "Yeah," Ed's voice came out confident and soft. "Yeah, they're there all right. Even _Him_..."

As his arm slipped around the circumference of her waist, Winry finally allowed her neck muscles to regress to their most vulnerable state— the only place where they could be in such a state— as they looked upon the milky blush of the stars; they scoured the sky with a radiating jealousy, perhaps at the moon, brilliantly outlining the clouds in opalescent tea water, or perhaps at them... after all, Ed's shoulder really was the best place in the world.

* ~ _1 month later_ ~ *

"Can I come in yet Winry?"

It had come. The day had finally, finally come. The day every girl, admittedly or not, dreamed about, in both fanatical vividness that ignored the realms of reality and embarrassed secrecy, stowed away deep within the caverns of the heart, no matter how unstereotypical or introverted. The day that made every girl stumble about herself as if the legs she'd been born with were rubbery pillars, sacks of skin that had gelatine for bones and overwrought elastics for muscles. She stumbled halfway across her room in this display of idiotic, unrefined madness, her body smacking against the wall magnificently as gravity attempted to stabilize her fucked up balance.

"Winry, is everything okay in there? Do you need any help?"

Oh yes. The joyous balance of a bride on her wedding day. It was definitely a day where you discovered just how bitchingly cunning the nerves really were.

"Just gimme a second!" Winry gave her bloomers one final yank, successfully slipping them over her hips and into their designated resting position before scrambling into her silk robe. _Now_ she could use some womanly assistance...

"Okay May, you can come in now!"

Securing the robe's tie, Winry turned to see May enter the room, a dry smile autonomically gracing her face as she attempted to hide her nerves.

"Ready for beautifying duty, Mrs. Elric!"

A firework display began sizzling into action somewhere within Winry's gut; she had _not_ needed to hear that. Not right now, anyways.

"Xiao Mei and I came up with the perfect idea for your hair and makeup," the Xingese girl babbled cheerfully, the prospects of the day obviously fuelling her into a bubbly ball of girly excitement. "So just sit right down and prepare to be _transformed_!"

Transformed... sounded promising.

May quickly began dumping out a large bag she had been toting, a plethora of bottles and tubes spraying out of its opening until a mountain of beauty products had been haphazardly assembled. Xiao Mei, sporting a cute little blue flower behind her ear, came somersaulting out after, just narrowly escaping the potential of a powder and cream avalanche as she grazed the perimeter of the products. She gave a disoriented sneeze, a plume of glitter accessorizing its descent.

"Xiao Mei, there you are!" May cradled the tiny panda in her arms, a tender moment of reunion exchanged between the two before a stern look of professionalism thundered across their faces with unanticipated simultaneity. "Let's begin!"

The two immediately began collecting products from the buffet of beauty supplies before them, at a speed much too fast for the non-Xingese eye to comprehend. Winry decided sitting down was her best option, both to maintain safety from the ninja hand movements and to evade any more unbalanced bursts of nerves.

A few seconds buzzed by before a fuzzy quartet of paws began crawling up her back; Xiao Mei was now perched atop Winry's shoulder, a large alligator-toothed hair clip stationed between her jaws.

"You just leave everything up to us, Mrs. Elric," May proclaimed, a comb that looked more like a weapon then a styling tool gravitating towards Winry's scalp. She flinched slightly as its point dug into her head.

"You can just call me Winry, May..." she laughed, attempting rather ineffectively to make it look as if she didn't actually care that she'd just been verbally referred to as Ed's wife. In actuality, it made her blood plummet a few degrees and her eyes mix up blue and red so that she saw red as blue, she could tell it must've been written all over her face, in big, bolded capital letters, that she was nervous as hell to be given such a title, yet still, she acted as if it hardly fazed her. Of _course_ it didn't faze her. Come on. She was a Rockbell. _The_ Winry Rockbell. Soon to be an Elric. Mrs. Edward Elric. Mrs. Edward... Elric...

She felt a vein snap. Right in her brain. Great, now she was going to die of a stroke, and it would be all _his_ fault—

"Don't be nervous, Mrs. Elric," May again read her mind with elementary ease. "Haven't you been dreaming of this day since you were a little girl?"

Of course. Of course she had. Shoved right in between those desires to achieve automail engineering perfection and becoming the most sought-after, famous mechanic in Amestris was that sparkling little fantasy, that dream of walking down a grandly decorated aisle, hair all tucked up beneath a veil and body struggling beneath the beautifully torturous weight of a wedding gown, one that flowed and shimmered and made people rubberneck whether they'd intended to or not. And of course, with that delicious depersonalization of the female mind, she'd pictured herself being embraced by a wonderful man, handsome and kind and caring, his smile lighting up the world and making her feel like she'd been transported to some heavenly galaxy of romance and blissful perfection. Although it'd often be a secondary thought next to the sensationally attractive idea of a new set of gleaming, shiny tools toiling away at the intricacies of a metal limb, it had still always been there. "... no."

Her head was viciously yanked back by the horrified tug of May's brush. "WHAT DO YOU MEAN, _NO_?"

No reasonable answer was willing to cover for her lie. "I dunno, I mean... I just..."

"Winry," May's voice had adopted a tone of impressive seriousness, the type of seriousness that made people stop dead in their tracks and do whatever you said, regardless of the insanity of the request. "That is quite impossibly not possible."

"But—"

"A young maiden fantasizes, from as tender an age as her hormonal fantasies will allow her to futuristically fantasize, about the day she will undoubtedly walk down that aisle, in a dress worthy of making a princess stare..." she continued to blabber on, her hands magically managing to twist and twirl Winry's hair into a lovely up do of messily refined slickness. "And then, there will come the most euphoric moment of them all, the one that gives definition to the meaning of romance and is considered to be the climax of the wedding..."

A pin was jabbed mercilessly into her skull, as if to symbolize the severity of the explanation. "The kiss!"

It was official. She was dying of a stroke. She could hear the blood spurting into tiny pools right in the caverns of her skull, thick and viscous and drowning her nerves into a desirable state of unconsciousness. It was only a matter of time now...

"Winry," May's voice turned nice and low, eliciting an automatic upsurge of suspense. "There is only one thing you _have_ to remember when it comes time for the kiss."

She wasn't sure if she particularly wanted to know. She didn't even want to think about it in general.

"When you kiss him, and that moment swells up from within you when you just know that he's the one..." May swooned about for a moment, before coming close to Winry's ear and dropping her voice to its most secretive level yet. "You gotta kiss him like you mean it. Kiss him like it's your last."

An unexpected squirt of hairspray nearly threw Winry off her seat. "Isn't that just the most romantic thought EVER?"

Truthfully, it made Winry want to throw up. "Y-Yeah..."

She sat there, petrified, as she heard May and Xiao Mei joyfully bounce around behind her, caught up in their own gushy girly fantasies. It made Winry wonder just how the innocent looking girl _knew_ so much about weddings... perhaps her thoughts were more corrupted than she'd thought... but by who...

A knock at the door sent Winry reeling and May shrieking delightedly: "Come_ iiiin_!"

The door whimpered open to reveal Al, all nicely done up in a crisp white tuxedo. His timing could not have been better. "Sorry to interrupt, but Winry has a visitor."

A ridiculously cute pair of emerald eyes peeked out from behind Al's legs, a shy little smile forming across her face as she made eye contact with Winry.

"Elicia-chan!" Her nerves were instantly blown away as the little girl came running up to her, petite blue flowers tied into her hair to match her pretty pastel dress. She threw her arms around Winry's neck as she kneeled down to greet her. "Elicia-chan, you've gotten so big!"

A giggle that could've killed a room full of mothers escaped Elicia's lips. "I have a present for you, Winry-oneesan!" She held up her chubby little hands, carefully revealing a gorgeous azure-tinted flower. "It's a... a... um..." she looked helplessly at Al, her face on the verge of imploding into tears if he didn't help her within the next two seconds.

"It's a Forget-Me-Not, remember Elicia?" he shot her a quick little grin, instantly alleviating Elicia's dramatic shift in moods. "Tell Winry why you got it for her."

She batted her big saucer eyes up at Winry, making it difficult for her _not_ to just give in and hug the little angel until her halo popped right off her head. "It sympathizes true love, since you're getting married!"

"You mean _symbolizes_, Elicia," Al piped up, his eyes smiling with a warmth Winry hadn't seen in ages. "Tell Winry the other reason why you got it though."

Gazing deeply into the little girl's eyes, Winry watched as remembrance illuminated their depths, making them look like soft, huggable jewels of sea-sick sky that went on endlessly, imbedding their insatiable curiosity into the fabric of her naive soul. "They also sympathize remembering, so that me and Winry-oneesan can remember our daddies together."

"Elicia-chan..." She couldn't help it; an overwhelming pang of emotions gripped her, locking her soul into an immobilized state of sublimation, a sort of vulnerability that just subjected itself to the blunt, searing ends of long tied back memories, the threads of the psyche, the ones that could sabotage emotional homeostasis when disembodied with a sadistic yank. Her eyes throbbed, haloed by gangs of tears that victimized her eyes, bullying them till they spilled her deepest, darkest secrets, secrets tainted by the viral weight of hurt and grief, they just dripped and leaked and couldn't help but reveal to the world how soul-ripping that one little statement had been. She felt disengaged, unable to communicate, unable to remember as her mind remembered much too much, it didn't want to remember, it couldn't help but remember, it hurt so much yet felt so good giving in to that weak little crack of sadness, it'd been tugged at and pulled open and now it was just seeping its contents, drenching and coating her body in its morose, heart-stabbing memories—

"Hey Elicia-chan, don't you think Al looks handsome in this pretty white tux he's wearing?" May's sunny voice shredded through the unseen sombre fog as she stood next to Al, an awkwardly large smile plastered across her face as she gave him a pat on the back. His face immediately became engulfed in a mortified 'what the fuck are you saying this for?' look.

Successfully diverting Elicia's attention to the blushing alchemist in the doorway, they were hardly prepared for what the unfathomably cute little girl was about to say next. "Is Al your boyfriend?" The question was so dangerously innocent, Winry couldn't help but giggle as she saw Al's face turn more shades of red than the rainbow itself could produce.

"Because Mommy told me when a boy and a girl fall in love they get married, and then they make kids, so that must mean—"

"Oh, Winry!" Al's voice was starting to sound similar to its pre-pubescent counterpart. "I forgot to mention, Nii-san wanted me to inform you that he has some major, uhh, _issues_ with the wedding guests."

She had been prepared for this. Although she hadn't been prepared to deal with it in the state she was in right now, she had mentally prepared herself to deal with Ed's disapproval of their wedding guests. "Well you can tell _Edward_ that if he doesn't smarten up and act like a mature man by the time I get married to him that he will be getting a wrench in the head faster than he can say 'I do'!"

Gauging the fluctuating moods of the situation, May was quick to begin escorting Al out of the room. "You go tell Ed to suck it up now, kay?" her voice reeked of artificial sweetness, made evident by the hasty way she had shoved Al out the door. "Now, Elicia-chan, what do you say we go look for some more pretty flowers to put in Winry's hair?"

Her doe eyes glanced up at Winry, as if to ask for her approval of the request; she gave her a gentle pat on the head. "Go ahead, Elicia-chan."

"Okay!" She shuffled over to May's side, taking her hand and giggling profusely as Xiao Mei scurried across her shoulders. "If Winry-oneesan is getting married, does that mean she's gonna be a mommy too?"

"Well, you know Elicia-chan..." the door muted their words as it shut, leaving Winry alone and isolated in her pink robe. She swore, she could feel the earth rotating at that moment. It made her dizzy if she thought about it for too long, for she could see her thoughts and feel her blood swerving against the sides of her skeleton, banging against it and bruising it with bruises that could never be detected, never be healed or erased, that never actually existed despite the subconscious way you just knew they did. With a disoriented stumble Winry made her way towards the window, her eyes deliberately going against her superego's commands not to go and peep at the guests before she was ready.

The entire front yard had been transformed into a picturesque scene of celebration, columns of chairs all neatly symmetrised against the backdrop of the Resembool landscape, a landscape so boring and so monotonous, it took your breath away, as if it _were_ something unforgettable. Maybe it was. Maybe it was an unforgettable sight, seeing a wedding take place on the grounds so many sheep had wandered aimlessly in the past, the grounds where so many people had begun journeys, both ones that were fulfilled and ones that had never seen an end. Perhaps Winry had secretly loved the ironic idea of having their wedding on these grounds, at the place where she had been subjected to so much torturous waiting and crying and longing. It was ironic. It was ironic in a totally unironic, unexplainable way. Who knew that a place like Resembool, a place that had known and seen and given solidity to so many ends, so many never ending ends, could give support to a beginning like this. She reached for her stomach with robotic instinct, rubbing the place that held such an incredible, miraculous secret.

"Mom... Dad..." she took a trembly breath, determined not to let her tears get the best of her. "Why do I have this feeling? Why?"It was a hard feeling to explain, to pinpoint even, but she knew if anyone could understand, her parents could. "I love him... I love Ed so much, and then this... this baby... " Just the thought of her baby, the precious mass of life forming and developing within her, made her nauseously anxious. Every night she would wake up, either crying or coughing, having to run to the bathroom to puke her guts out, to escape the vivid nightmares and the reek of blood coating them all, having to lie to Ed that everything was okay and under control, jesus she was so stupid, so stupid to think for even one second that this marriage would make things better, that somehow, someway, getting married to the man she loved would eradicate this feeling that the baby was not okay.

"What's wrong with it? Why can't I protect it? Why can't I see it or f-feel it or fix it? Why? Can't I just... j-just..."

_Be strong, sweetie._

She spun around, eyes wide, and scanned the empty contents of the room, her heart beat echoing into the emptiness. It felt so empty, so blaringly, evidently empty, that Winry was no longer sure if it _was_ empty. But... she could've sworn...

A blunt rapping at the door practically made her heart disconnect from her circulatory system. "C-Come in!"

Oxygen going everywhere but her lungs, Winry gawked breathlessly as Granny Pinako came marching into her room, looking unusually well-groomed in a dove-blue sundress and carrying a curious brown box. "What's wrong with you?"

"Uhh..." Winry decided that answering her was not a wise option. "What's in the box?" She quickly put on her sweetest smile.

A moment slinked by as Granny Pinako eyed her down, visually padding her for any signs of secrecy or emotional weaponry, making Winry wonder if she could ever do _anything_ without people perfectly reading her mind. "It's a gift fer you."

Stunned, although for no identifiable reason, Winry took the box from her, her fingers sliding along its edges with wondrous delight. "Should I open it now?"

"Wha'dja think I came up 'ere for?"

Smiling softly, Winry removed the lid from its slumbering position of closure, unable to abolish the childish little inkling of excitement that had begun to make her heart bounce about boisterously. Peering into her gift's insides like an apprentice surgeon, Winry felt the breath hover coarsely in her throat; there, perched majestically within the little brown box, was a beautiful necklace, teensy little crystal blue flowers grandly fastened to one another by a delicate silver chain.

"Granny, this is..." she was too possessed by its pulchritude to form a formidable sentence of gratitude.

"It was yer mom's," she stated gruffly, undaunted by Winry's frazzled speech. "She wanted me to give it to ya when ya got married."

All she could do was stare. If she'd have done anything else, she probably would've lost it. She was tempted to just throw the damn thing, violently ripping the link between her and her mother away from her face, away from her stupidly transfixed eyes, but she couldn't do that. She could never do that.

Her mother had always loved flowers. Winry remembered that very well. She could still remember tromping out into the dewy fields of the morning, plucking up every little blossom and bud that resembled some sort of pretty floral offering from the earth. And then, with a smile that stole light from the sun, Winry would present her findings to her mother, and she would watch proudly as she placed them in a vase that sat atop the kitchen table for everyone to admire. She'd loved doing that. And now, it was as if her mother was giving her back all those trepid years of flower picking, but in the form of this beautiful, nostalgic necklace.

The whispering of the door sifted through the moment, although Winry was still too caught up in her thoughts to actually comprehend such a basic sound.

"Winry-oneesan, I have flowers for you!" Elicia's shrill little voice tore Winry's thoughts apart as she came bounding into the room, bubbly and glowing. "Ooooh, pretty!" She ogled lavishly over the necklace in her hands.

"Did you wanna put it on for me, Elicia-chan?" She nodded happily as Winry placed the necklace in her hands, lifting up her hair as Elicia fumbled to do it up properly.

"Sorry for the delay!" May called in, her and Xiao Mei both holding onto a bundle of fragile little flower blossoms. "All of the guests are starting to arrive, so I was busy greeting a few familiar faces."

"I'll go attend to that," Granny Pinako intervened, giving Winry once last, hard glance before turning around and making her way towards the chaotic lower level.

"Now then, let us begin with the finishing touches, shall we Elicia-chan?"

The two girls immediately began twining flowers into Winry's up do, Elicia placing them with mildly tasteful aesthetic and May and Xiao Mei busily rearranging them accordingly. "There're lots of people down there, isn't there Elicia-chan?"

"Yeah!" Elicia exclaimed, a flower flittering from out of her hand and onto Winry's lap. "Lots of Daddy's friends came!"

"And you met some of our friends from Xing too, right?"

"Oh yeah, Mr. Ling gave me a coin, see?" Distractedly Elicia pulled her newest possession from out of her dress pocket, showing it to Winry with eager pride; she couldn't help but immediately notice whose face cockily graced its metallic surface...

"And Elicia's mom brought a whole bunch of her famous apple pies for the celebration," May added casually, although she sounded as if she was hinting at something deeper. "I think everyone will like eating those instead of a typical wedding cake, don't you agree, Mrs. Elric?"

May's words cascaded right through her ears, twirling through her cochlea and tickling the occipital lobe into wakefulness, yet somehow, they didn't register. Her brain was barricading all thoughts and words from making any kind of meaningful impact on Winry's overloaded mind. It was happening. Now that it was happening, she couldn't believe it actually _was_ happening. She was getting married. She was getting married, to the boy who had forever and always been her childhood friend, that was all they were ever supposed to be, yet somehow they ended up being more than that, it was a mystery Winry had no intentions of ever dissecting, how her image of him had slowly been manipulated till he had undeniably overtaken her thoughts and imperialized her sanity. And now it was up to her and Ed, the love of her life, the father of her soon to be born child, to take the final step in completing their journey, their unforeseen, strangely destined journey of holy matrimony.

* * *

><p><em>You look just like her Winry. <em>

_You look just like her. _

_She'd be so proud. _

Something, somewhere, in some unidentified portion of the brain still foreign and unknown to biologists, was a voice that kept repetitively telling her that. Over and over. After a while it had become so insanely annoying that it'd actually started to sound quite soothing, like some off-pitch lullaby, helping drown out the low murmur of voices that covered the crowd in an audible haze. But still...

She didn't have to be told like that. She knew. Deep deep down inside, in that area of the memory bank perched on the edge between oblivion and recollection, Winry knew full well that she looked identical to her mother on her wedding day. Hell, she was wearing her _dress_ for god's sake, a stunning dress the color of finely crushed diamonds, but the kind that looked white and brilliant no matter which angle your eyes sneaked a peek. Winry had known the instant she'd laid eyes on it that it would be the one, the way its capped sleeves perched lazily atop her biceps and the corset portion dipped into a magnificent V, just enough to reveal a hint of cleavage. And then, to finish it all off was the skirt, a fluffy, floor-kissing length of material that was a collection of rows and rows of carefully crafted ruffles, each one spilling atop the row below it until it was forced to conclusively fan out. It was a stunner. Maybe that's why she felt so nervous, waiting to walk down the grassy Resembool aisle, a flimsy veil the only thing dividing her from security and reality. Yes, that was probably the reason—

No, it wasn't. That wasn't it at all. She knew she was wrong the second she laid eyes on him. He was wearing a white tuxedo. She had known he would be, but apparently her mind had not been visually prepared enough to actually ingest the image. And his hair was pulled back so neatly, into a long ponytail, like strands of never-ending golden rain caught mid-drop. She could hardly peel her eyes away from him even as Elicia, cute as a baby-blue button, sprinkled blue and white flower petals down the aisle, the aisle that she was about to walk down. Everyone seemed to be surrounding the aisle, all nicely done up in their finest clothes. Roy, Riza, and all the other familiar faces you'd expect to see next to them. Izumi and her husband. Ling and LanFan. Granny Pinako and Gracia. Hell, even Garfiel was there. Wearing a bridesmaid's outfit, of course. She hadn't expected any different, actually...

It was Al's turn next. It had only took a second of hesitation before May had violently pushed him into action, nearly resulting in the rings and pillow to go flying into the lap of one unsuspecting guest. Winry took a deep breath, the feeling of hemoglobin fleeing and leaving her pale and light-headed easing for a moment before she exhaled it all back out again.

She felt a nudge on her arm. "You okay?" May grinned up at her, evidently unaffected by the swirly maelstrom of nerves that was consuming Winry and spinning her into a nauseous mess. "I hear it's when you first see the groom that you really start to feel the nerves."

Oh, she'd heard right. Winry didn't think she'd even have any nerves _left_ by the time this whole thing finished. Her body was way too keen on getting high off their jittery goodness.

Most likely sensing her aura of trembling energy, May linked arms with her, urging Winry to take a tiny step closer to that aisle of life-changing abilities. This was it... this was it...

"Your mommy and daddy are getting married now, baby," Winry cooed softly, her thoughts psychologically hugging her baby before they went back to prepping themselves for the walk of her life. "We're getting married." The words fell from her mouth like lead rain drops as the news kicked her pituitary gland into action. At least she had May supporting her on the side. She probably couldn't have done it otherwise.

"Let's go Winry," May chimed, tugging her till she was forced to move her feet in a cohesive fashion. "You're finally getting married! This is it!"

Walking across a length of Resembool grass had never seemed so dramatic. Or petrifying. Or euphoric. She could physically feel peoples' eyes resting on her, their pupils weighing her down until she could've sworn her heels had become permanently drilled into the dirt below, yet she continued on, capable, unrestrained. The first outburst of tears came from Garfiel, quietly followed by a smiling Gracia. Somehow, Winry could sense the tears of her mother hitting the supple dirt ground below too.

They were now nearly at the end of the aisle, to the place where her and Ed would officially be united. It was then that Winry noticed, (she actually _had _noticed it, a long time ago, just never properly ingested the visual) that General Armstrong, clad in a dainty looking black suit, was standing at the end, ready to recite the vows.

"Go on," May urged softly, her arm unhinging from Winry's as she went to stand next to Al. _Well_...

Slowly she faced Ed, a feeling gnawing at her heart that was, quite simply, indescribable. Perhaps it was a medley of emotions, so many that the brain couldn't even properly discern them as diverse feelings of individuality. Or maybe they were just empty, waiting to be filled with emotion as the vows began and she made eye contact with Ed for the first time in what felt like a millennia. She had no idea. It made her sickeningly excited either way.

"On this day, we gather here to celebrate the union..."

The moment her eyes slipped into his, the entire world around her went black. No sound, no color, nothing. Not even the booming vocal capacity of Armstrong could seep through the barrier containing her and Ed. She had never seen him look so mature before. Well she had, but at the same time she hadn't. She could tell, just by the way his fingers had latched onto hers, that he was nervous. Even beneath the hard, frowny look of his, she could tell that he was taking in her outfit, the ensemble that made her look so much like her mother, and visually coming to terms with the woman he was about to marry, about to commit the rest of his life to. The thought of actually legally being connected to this man... this man who used to be her childhood friend, the boy that had always teased her and fought with her, like a brother... here she was, holding hands with him, locked in his gaze of eternal gold, trapped in his spell of love, a spell she had never expected to be so incredibly, pathetically vulnerable to. Never had she expected it, yet, it felt so natural she wondered how she ever could've _not _expected it to happen. This was supposed to happen. Somewhere, written in the coded language of the stars, was their destiny to be together in this crazy, fucked up world. Surely their parents were laughing.

"Miss Winry Rockbell, if you could repeat after me..."

The vows poured from her mouth with poetic fluidity, thickly steeped in an emotional tone of voice that Winry had never known she was capable of producing. She'd taken the ring from Al, gracefully slipping it onto Ed's finger with only a flicker of tears threatening to spill from her eyes. She'd been waiting for this moment. She'd been waiting for so long, without even knowing, only subconsciously aware...

"And if you, Mr. Edward Elric, could repeat after me..."

Ed's voice came with a shaky start, but eventually he began to sound calmer as Winry squeezed his hands lovingly. He looked so handsome, she couldn't even deny it any longer, she couldn't hide the erupting feeling of happiness that he was hers and only hers, no one else's, just hers, Winry Rockbell's, the feeing became unbearable as he slipped the ring onto her finger, the symbolic evidence of their relationship, of their love...

It was time to make it count.

"... you may now kiss the bride!"

The world must've spun fifty times before they made mouth to mouth contact, and when they finally did it felt as if a nebula had exploded into interstellar confetti somewhere far off in the solar system. Winry injected her love into the kiss, gripping Ed's head and feeling her feet levitate right off the ground as he lifted her into his amorous embrace. It really did feel like it was their last kiss, the way their lips almost magnetically clung together, the way their bodies gravitated towards each other with such innate effortlessness, it couldn't be real, it was far too perfect, it just felt far far too perfect to be real, yet here she was, balanced in his arms, kissing him with nothing but a tear defiantly skidding down her cheek. They were married now. She was now officially able to call herself...

Mrs. Edward Elric, wife of the former Fullmetal Alchemist.

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><p><strong>AN:** Since this was so long I'll shut up and spare you from my blabbering. HOPE YOU ENJOYED! *hides for eternity*

And btw... the answer to last chapter's trivia question was **Newton's Third Law of Motion**, so congrats to all who got it right :D Keep staying tuned for chapter 6!


	6. Chapter 6

**A/N:** I present to, Chapter 6! I hope you're able to find some enjoyment out of it...

And lolol, someone said in one review that I like to hide for eternity a lot. In response to that... yes, yes I do. Why? Because I am far too scared of how the writing gods will look upon my work to hear it for myself (aka reviews make me piss myself and want to go die in a hole). Does that make any sense? XP

* * *

><p>* ~ 2 months later ~ *<p>

"EDWARD ELRIC, WHERE IN THE BLOODY HELL IS MY EXTRA CREAMY EXTRA FROTHY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY EXTRA YUMMY VANILLA MILKSHAKE OF SUPREME HEARTBURN RELIEVING GOODNESS DRIZZLED IN MELTED PEANUT BUTTER TOPPED WITH DARK CHOCOLATE SHAVINGS AND FINISHED OFF WITH A SIDE OF COKE CANDIES?"

A marvellously ear-numbing crash protruded from the kitchen. A highly flustered Al (who looked like he was on the verge of running out the door and taking refuge at the neighbour's house) came running up to her, sucking back air like a bug-eyed fish that had nothing better to do than suck the side of a tank and look like the most freakishly useless life form on earth.

"I-I'm really sorry Winry!" he heaved. "Nii-san didn't close the blender right, so he pretty much wasted all the milk and now it's all over him and he's in a really pissy mood, so um um um, he's gonna go to the store right now, yeah, yeah that's what he's gonna do…"

Well, that would explain all the swearing she was hearing.

"Do you have any idea…" Winry could feel her blood steaming up, making her veins squirm and bulge. "… how fucking bad…. MY HEARTBURN IS?"

"I'm really sorry—"

"I WANT MY MILKSHAKE _NOW_ AL!"

"Y-Y-Y-Yes Winry! R-Right away Winry!"

How unbelievably rude. Here she was, lying on the couch, her heart being deep-fried into this crispy, sweating grease ball of throbbing meat, and Al had the nerve to tell her that her milkshake would not be coming in less than fifty seconds. Jesus Christ.

…

She wanted a donut. A golden, sugar-coated donut, one that was glimmering in oil and capable of leaving behind a path of greasy goodness with every tumble it took. She wanted it _now_.

"Alphonse."

The younger Elric brother nearly skidded to a halt; he was obviously highly disturbed at having his escape interrupted by its main perpetrator. "Yes?"

"I also want donuts. Those little golden round ones, you know, the ones covered in sugar that are all hot and crispy and full of delectable calorie-laden goodness."

"Uh, sure Winry," his voice quavered, as if every word he uttered had the potential to combust into a deadly flaming supernova if they hit Winry in just the wrong way. "Did you just want those, or did you also want the jam-filled ones—"

"DID I SAY ONCE THAT I WANTED JAM-FILLED DONUTS AL? NO, NO I DIDN'T, SO SHUT UP AND GO GET ME MY DONUTS!" her shrieking morphed mid-sentence into a passionate crescendo of wailing, leaving Winry crying and flipping about on the couch, hot and thoroughly agitated. All she wanted was a donut. And a milkshake. And just a little god damn cooperation. Was that really so freaking difficult?

Hot, wretched tears swerved down her cheeks, leaving behind a trail that felt similar to inferno slug slime. It was coming again, that feeling of… regret. Guilt. Immense guilt. She was such a bitch. Al hadn't done anything wrong. In fact, he'd been one of the most supportive individuals _ever_ after having the bomb of news dropped on him that he was about to become an uncle in less than six months, which indirectly meant that they had told him that she and Ed had had sex, which had led to an extremely awkward bout of silence that had ended in Al shouting 'Nii-san!' and Ed firing back 'Shut up Al!" and Winry crying 'I'm so sorry!' and… and…

She didn't particularly care to relive that scene again. It was a memory she would've rather had drowned out in her cerebrospinal fluid, dead and forgotten. But something told her she'd want to hold on to that memory. God knew why.

"I'm sorry Al," Winry clasped her face, covering its despicable look of red-faced, anger-worn bitchiness. "I'm so sorry…"

"Winry."

His voice took her by surprise. _His_ voice. That voice of soft deliberateness, of rough understanding, of perfectly withheld bluntness; Ed's voice.

Before she could even fathom the courage to look deeply into his reassuring, calming gold eyes, more calming and warm and lovely than even the most perfectly fried, perfectly golden sugar-donut, Ed's hands were plucking her fingers, one by one, away from her face, their surface salted in tears and clenched into a gnarly shape of paralysis. She had no choice now. She had already been entangled, ready or not, in his gaze of mood-murdering honey.

"Don't worry about it, okay?" he spoke quietly, as if he was just as embarrassed hearing his words as he was thinking them. "Al's a tough kid."

She swallowed back a globule of mucus. "I-I know."

"And if he does have a problem," Ed slammed his fist into his palm, a look of evil brotherly love slinking across his face. "Then he'll be getting a bloody reminder from his oh so wonderful big brother!" A few droplets of stray milk swung from his hair as he gave a cocky laugh.

"Sure Ed." She couldn't help giggling a little, the sight of a milk-drenched, ruffled up Ed standing before her too priceless.

He shot her a look of vacant disgust. "What?"

She dabbed her finger atop a tiny bead of milk hovering along his cheek, its desperate attempt at maintaining adhesion shattered as her touch ruptured its skin. "Our child better not have an aversion to milk, or else I'm blaming your genes."

"Oh whatever!" Ed grumbled in annoyance. "However," his face slyly shifted to a look of smug victory, sparkles of self-admiration dancing about his head before he had even finished his sentence. "We allknow that the talent, smarts, and good-looks will be coming from _my_ side of the family!"

"Excuse me?" Winry gave a gasp of dramatically-enhanced disbelief. "Our child will be a physics mastermind thanks to _my_ lovely contribution of Rockbell genes!"

"More like an alchemist mastermind! It'll be transmuting its way out of your damn uterus!"

A comeback of fiery magnitude was about to slip from Winry's mouth when a hugely unexpected sensation arrested every thought in her body; her…

Her insides….. they were _speaking_ to her. They were trying to tell her something, trying to have a conversation with her, poking and prodding the slimy, cell-crammed walls of her stomach till it convulsed about in an aroused frenzy, a spastic anxiety generated from an unknown source, some mysteriously palpable entity, one that made her blood pool into puddles of fear far far away and shiver in curious trepidation. It lasted for such a brief moment, Winry started to second guess herself, wondering if she was going mad, when it suddenly happened again, this time with an even more definitive punch.

Her organs were possessed. Someone's hands were now comfortably soaking in the bloody hot springs of her blood and body fluids, splashing them up against the stomach's domed ceiling and massaging its muscular surface with uneven nudges, nudges that felt insanely foreign and contaminating yet at the same freakish time incredibly soothing and peaceful, almost ethereal, nearly non-existent. As terrified as she was, she was also completely calm… the anxiety wasn't anxiety… it was… it was _joy_. How could this…

And then it hit her. It hit her right in the most tender, most vulnerable part of her stomach, and with such a weak blow, it left her reeling in the non-existent pain of comprehension.

The baby was moving.

"Ed," her voice was hardly audible, drowned in shivers, scared to stir even the tiniest of sound waves for fear of startling the baby back into a state of motionless retreat. "Ed, it's moving! It's moving!"

Briskly she grabbed Ed's hand and placed it atop her stomach, its surface rising into a gentle hump that just barely hinted at the life form now forming within its very walls. "Do you feel it?"

For the first time in her life, Winry was completely unable to read his expression. She found it rather difficult to do anything, actually, as she wallowed in the unreal feeling of having a living creature fondle her insides. Things like breathing, things like thinking, they seemed lame, uninspiring, insipid even, when compared to that feeling. This creation of life, this breathing creature constructed from the elaborate tongue of DNA, its details contrived from its heavy codex accent and uniquely fateful compilation of alleles… it was touching her, breathing with her, living with her, sharing with her this incredible, miraculous experience taking place right within her very own stomach.

"It's…" Ed's voice wavered, jumping at its own deepness. "It's kicking!"

His eyes had come alive, dancing about like lost sparks scrambling for a surface to burn, like fireworks on a windy day. A brilliant flare of pride glimmered from their depths; he was going to make such a good father.

Placing both hands on either side of her belly, Winry leaned in as close as she could to her stomach, eyes looking down upon its nude surface with a nurturing gaze of azure. "This is your daddy." She smiled up at Ed, encouraging him to keep his hand still.

Her stomach lurched, as if her entire insides were lining up and preparing to migrate right out of her belly button, but Winry held tight. It was remarkable, feeling her little baby communicate in ways humans forgot communication could work. An overwhelming sense of attachment came over her, binding her in its ties of love and connection, a connection that could never be broken even with the sharpest wire snippers in the world. It snatched the breath right out of her mouth, how a connection could be formed with such seeming ease, how it could just fasten her to this duty of caring and loving this thing she'd never even seen, yet she knew it perfectly, better than anyone, she could feel it's every jolt and every contraction and every burst of experimental limb twitching, she could feel it all from the inside out, she could sense the shape and the size and the positioning, her blood and hormones were simply buzzing in excitement at the extra duties they so diligently had to perform, they simply couldn't keep back the gossiping giveaway of what this baby was like. It was like tangibly, physically being able to feel a feeling. A really really complex, rapidly developing feeling.

"Nii-san? Nii-san, what's taking you so—"

The moment of fetal bonding had successfully been ruined. Al came waltzing into the living room, an impeccable look of oblivious innocence smothering his face, and was quickly given the newsflash that he had interrupted a 'moment'.

As to what that moment had been centered around came rather quickly to the ignorant Elric brother. "HEY, I wanna feel the baby too! You _guys_!" He dashed over to Winry's side, eyes bulging from his head like a caffeine-high apprentice eagerly watching his mentor.

"Sorry Al," Winry broke the news to him with a blunt note of apology. "The baby's taking a rest now. You can feel it next time."

He stood up with a defeated pout, his eyes taking on a pissy sort of glint as he caught sight of Ed beaming at him like he'd just missed the most amazing thing in the world (which, technically speaking, he had). "And here I am being all nice and getting you donuts and—"

"OH MY GOD MY DONUTS!" The image of those fluffy, battery bites of deep-fried edible-gold goodness re-entered Winry's brain in a mouth-watering flash. "Well don't just stand there, GO GET ME SOME!"

Arms now crossed in an extremely disdained, highly unimpressed fashion, Winry glared down the two men as they scrambled to get their shit together and go buy her her holy cakes of velvety delectability. Al was the first of the two to make his escape out the front door, and, just as the older one was about to take a step outside, he turned back around to face Winry.

"What?" her voice shook a little as he walked back up to her. "If my donuts are cold because of your slowness then I—"

"Are you gonna be okay?" Ed's words deflected her own with impervious pluck.

Of course she couldn't just answer him. Any answer she gave would be deemed 'not good enough' by the overly protective, overly worried father-to-be, which, Winry inwardly admitted, was unbearably cute and made her want to glomp him into a kawaii stack of golden Elric pancakes but, at times like this, the habitual autonomy tended to be a tad problematic. Especially when it held up her donut consumption experience.

"I'll be fine Ed," she smiled, although a part of her felt strained at the act. "Since when have I _ever_ been incapable of taking care of myself?"

Oh yes, he had no means of arguing with that. Helplessly defeated, Ed gave a sarcastically exasperated sigh. "I won't be long then."

He leaned in, his expression stiff with uncertain determination, before he gave her a light kiss on the lips, just a baby one, like he was offering her a preview of the whole lip service package. They parted just as Winry's mouth had begun its salivating whine for more, tasting the air in its last hopeless attempts to taste his lips a smidgen longer.

"By the time I get back," his voice came out high and pitchy, it's words obviously trying hard to divert her attention away from his previous moment of self-initiated intimacy. "You'll have all the donuts the Resembool bakery can cough up!" He shot her a quick wink before taking off out the door.

The corpulent compression of aloneness flattened down on Winry quickly, mummifying her into this lonesome figure and pressing her body down down down, further and further into this pathetic game of waiting, this pathetic game of impatience that strung her heart strings like a harp, letting them vibrate and sound off into the distance with their pitiable moanish melody, one that chilled the air and reminded it of just how alone it was. Such a barren game, the waiting game was. It made you feel like you had to atone for something that was rather unatonable, fabricate a purpose for your destinationless journey with unfathomable rolls of imperceptible dice, they would just roll on and on and on down the board, never stopping, always cackling in that awkward way squares try to roll. Maybe she really _had_ lied when she told Ed that'd she'd be fine. Maybe she had known, deep down inside, that she'd be completely unable to play this game by herself, a complete infant when it came to struggling through the game board of awaitence. She had played it so much, so incredibly much, yet she still didn't get the rules, they were like English instructions designed in a way to be understood only in another language, the language of patience and pursuit, the language she had failed so many times to pick up just one little word in—

Then it hit her; she wasn't alone. She wasn't alone at all. The bond between her and her baby, the baby that had been given to her as a lifeline to use during these draining games of wait, was right there inside her, providing her with the escape rope she needed to manoeuvre her way from out of the tangled confines of the game, from out of the jail cell holding her hostage and systematically indoctrinating her to believe that she had been abandoned and left to rot in a place of no return, of eternal waiting. She would never be alone again. She could finally play this game now, she had the means to defeat it, she had the ability, she had—

… she had to pee.

Winry stood up carefully, all of her movements inhibited now by the constant reminder that she had something very delicate, very fragile growing inside her. The bathroom had become both her best friend and her worst enemy, housing daily memories and giving her that lovely aromatic reminder upon each entry as to her adventures in the wonderful world of morning sickness. She hated its chilly tile floor and despised of its disgusting ceramic toilet top, yet oh how she adored those soft chills the floor sent down her spine after a painful upsurge of volumeless vomit, how she revered the toilet seat's undying promise of support, a promise that it had never broken even as she had thrusted her head so far into its depths her hair had had its first mild experience in a puke onsen. It was a love-hate relationship at its finest.

And so, as Winry entered her heavenly hellhole, she tried her absolute best at ignoring the putrid humidity clamping upon her skin. Amazing really, how puke could just acclimatize a room so magnificently. Truly astounding.

Nose eventually becoming immune to the lingering stench of bodily contents, Winry sat her ass down on the toilet, underwear pulled down so as to dangle at her feet like a fangirl clinging to false love. The urine melodically began to trickle down into the watery regions of the toilet bowl, exiting at first with a grand spray of strength and then slowly tapering off, dying out as the show nearly came to its conclusion, before finally giving one last push of adrenaline as it completed its encore. Nothing strange. Nothing peculiar. Her pee was acting like pee. Then why…

A strange hollow was making her gut cramp suddenly, a hollow that was so incredibly empty in feeling that it felt bloated and obtrusive, forcing her organs to shift over and rearrange themselves all for this one stupid black hole of a hollow. Something wasn't feeling right. A premonition had formed. A mother's premonition, perhaps? Like_ she_ had a fucking clue…

Actually, she did. It was staring her in the face, right in the fucking face, bright red and sticky and shiny, bulbously foul-looking yet mesmerizingly terrifying all in one glance. There, resting ever so ungracefully atop her underwear, was a blob of blood. It scarred her panties brilliantly, leeching into their fuzzy white purity and marring them with the vagina's bloody signature, its overture of bright red, discharge-laced abandonment. It was too quiet to scream. Much, much too quiet.

Winry stood up, her muscles too scared to shake, too scared to give out on her and watch her collapse across the floor. Some strange mode of autopilot, of muscle memory had taken over, had begun violently spinning the toilet paper roll and balling up as much of the flimsy white material as it could, her hands just kept rolling and rolling and rolling ,watching its white sheets hurl into a heaping mob of cluttered, crowded toilet paper, they wouldn't stop, they simply had to hide this evidence, had to clean up this perfectly simple mistake made by her body, of course her body hadn't meant to bleed like this, she was pregnant for fuck sakes, her body must've made a simple error in hormonal regulation, that was all, nothing more nothing less, the baby was fine, she was fine, all that wasn't fine were her panties, they weren't fine, in fact they would be stained for a very long time now, that'd be an awfully hard stain to get out, but the toilet paper would help, it'd take the edge off the—

The room was filled with her panicked screaming before it had even had a chance to brace itself. Everything shook, it all shivered and shook as her vocal cords sent thunderous vibrations down her spinal cord and through her bloodstream, nothing was still, nothing was calm, nothing was okay, nothing could be okay as her underwear remained encircling her ankles, scarred with the marks of an error, with the marks of a problem, with the prognosis of the body telling her that this was not okay, things were not okay, all she could do was scream and try to get it out of her body, vocally exorcise the bitching problem right out of her stiffly screaming body till all that was left was a worn-out pair of unusable vocal cords, hell she'd scream till they snapped, she wanted them to snap, that way there'd be another problem, an even worse problem that her body would be forced to deal with, there wouldn't be time to deal with the problem mocking her on her underwear, it'd just disappear and be forgotten, nothing was wrong, nothing was wrong, nothing was fucking, fucking wrong—

Her mouth was shivering. No sound was audibly coming forth from its shadowy cavern. Spit had gathered at her lips, dribbling off into gravity's hands in long, gangly strands of overstretched shine. Winry closed her mouth, then opened it, then closed it again and opened it, she just kept repeating this procedure, like some kind of automatic evacuation response gone wrong, until she could feel the spit forming a film across her mouth, a film that shivered and glimmered before being smacked back down and grinded into a sticky pool atop her lips. Screaming was futile. The screaming was futile. She couldn't scream anymore. She couldn't… she couldn't…

Forehead slamming onto the counter, Winry felt her body convulse with a fresh batch of tears. Stupid stupid tears. She didn't want them. She wasn't going to cry. She was _done_ with crying. There was no reason to cry anyways, no reason at all why she should be panicking about the bathroom like this, acting like she had foreseen some gruesome murder. The air sat atop her bare skin lipidly.

What a violent game of waiting this had become. After all those years, all those years of practice, she could never have been ready enough for this. Fuck it. Fuck it all. As the hot tears began burning away at her mushy tear ducts, Winry knew what had to be done. It was the only thing that _could_ be done. She didn't know how she was going to tell Ed. She hardly knew how to break the news to herself. But she knew… for new signs, new evidence, new symptoms…

All she could do was wait.

* * *

><p>"Winry?"<p>

Her name. That was her name. She lifted her head heavily off the counter, the harsh colors of the world assaulting her vision with bright bursts of swirly twirly vertigo. The skin surrounding her eyes felt puffy, but not the delicate, soft kind of puffy, the kind of puffy that was on the same level as lead-filled cotton balls kind of fluffy. Hair haphazardly hanging off the counter in a drunken, sluggish fashion, Winry managed to get to her feet, her hands pushing against the counter far too liberally for such a simple bodily command.

"Yo Winry, you're damn donuts are gonna get cold if you don't come and get 'em!"

His voice seemed so far away. Maybe it was. Maybe she wasn't even in the bathroom right now, looking down at her trembling hands as they used every sinewy once of strength to hold her up. Maybe it had all been a dream. That's right; she'd fallen asleep during one of her routine puke fests, and, having been so worn out from purging her insides sparkly clean, she'd slunk onto the bathroom counter in a climatic collapse of tiredness. That had to be it. But…

… that didn't really explain why her underwear were soliciting down at her ankles.

"Winry?" Footsteps. Or at least, a thudding of the ground that sounded like footsteps, a mild disruption to the floorboards' alignment that sounded like footsteps. They were coming her way, to that dreaded bathroom lair of lies and warped reality. Somehow she found the ability to pull up her underwear, an act of decency even her muscles knew better than to ignore, before Ed had located her in her favourite little sanctuary.

From the corner of her eye she watched him score her peripheral vision. Yet she wouldn't move. Her mouth was being rebellious, clamping shut every time she tried to say something, her mind freezing up every time a phrase tainted with explanatory notes came into semi-formation. She had to tell him. He had a right to know. But she didn't want to. She wanted it to be a secret for the rest of her life. _Her_ secret. Her own dirty, paralyzing little secret. No one had to be contaminated with the poison of her secret but her. _She'd_ be the one to die with it, die with it mutating her cells till they grew and swelled and popped into smithereens. She couldn't infect Ed with it too. She just couldn't.

"Are you okay?" Ed asked cautiously, as if the very sight of her was enough to elicit thoughts of mental instability. But that was all it'd took to crack the lock to her mouth.

"Ed…" her poor, abused vocal cords could hardly even splutter his name. "I-I didn't mean to…"

Winry ripped herself from the countertop and threw her arms around his neck, her body too weak and too crippled from that torturous sight to go on holding itself up any longer. Tears spilled without meaning to, snot leaked without meaning to, the world below her just felt like it was crumbling away, disintegrating every where she tried to step, destroying all hopes of stability and sturdiness. All she had was him. All she had was Ed. He was her everything.

Recollecting himself from the abrupt greeting, Ed wrapped his own arms around Winry, one finding a very comfortable, very warm place right at the back of her head and the other resting protectively on her lower back. Her spine twitched a little, frightened from the touch of the world. "I didn't mean to."

She burrowed her head further into the safety of his chest, her eyes revelling in the darkness and never wanting to seek the light again.

He began gently rubbing her head, his breaths so warm and certain against her frightened face. "Just tell me Win. Scream it, whisper it, I don't care, just tell me. Tell me everything."

She tightened the hold around her wrist, pulling herself closer to Ed's unfaltering, steadfast body, annihilating the gap, the shadow, the airy chasm between her and her everything. "Something's wrong."

There was a beat of silence as the words were ingested by both of them. No one needed clarification on the topic. The dense silence of the room had been evidence enough.

"How do you know?" his words were so innocent. So unsuspecting. So not ready to have the burden of her secret weighing them down with that constant flicker of worry that would always, always be there.

"I just know."

By some internal instinct, some nudge of the intuition, Winry unravelled her arms from around Ed, her fingers yanking at her underwear and pulling them down her legs with unprecedented alacrity. "Look!"

"Jesus Christ!" Ed's face became a brilliant shade of red, the hue growing deeper and deeper with every millisecond that squeaked by. "What the fuck are you—"

"Look!" obviously requiring directional aid, Winry pointed a finger down at the bloody outcropping of discharge on her underwear. "Kneel down if you have to!"

He did just that.

"It's… its blood," he commented blankly, the immense severity of the situation evidently not registering in the slightest. "Aren't you _supposed_ to bleed when you're pregnant?"

"NO!" her voice cracked profusely, tears lubricating her words and making them shaky and difficult to control, their speed just wouldn't cooperate with her thoughts and their intensity just wouldn't adhere with the correct emotions. "No Ed, you're not supposed to bleed, shit like this isn't supposed to happen, didn't you pay any attention during health class?"

Her fear was being mistaken by the body for rage now, she could feel it making her veins seize up in heat and her heart pump out in petrified frustration. Her head felt like a war zone, every brain cell blown to bits by the deadly, overblown sounds of the world surrounding her, everything seemed so splittingly, insufferably loud, there was no end to it, the sounds just kept shooting and gunning down her brain cells till there was nothing left but pain and throbbing. Not a body of serotonin was present in her brain; they had all been obliterated by the deafening pierce of reality. Oh how she longed for their gentle, calming kiss of hormonal relief…

"Okay Winry, just calm down," his voice was stiff, evidently trying its hardest to remain strong while simultaneously dealing with a hormonally raging female and staring a bloody pair of panties in the face. "I'm sure everything's perfectly fine—"

"NO IT'S NOT ED!"

"Winry—"

"I'M SUCH A TERRIBLE MOTHER!"

"Winry seriously—"

"MAY & XIAO MEI TO THE RESCUE!"

The young Xingese alchemist and her panda sidekick had suddenly entered the doorway, striking a rather extraneous ninja pose.

Ed's face instantly scowled in annoyance. "Fuck just get out, I have this all under control—"

"Mr. Elric," May walked right up to the red-faced Ed, a look of arrogance spread across her face as she gunned him down with a heavy glare. "SHUT UP!"

She continued walking right past the (now) heavily swearing, thoroughly enraged spitfire of a man, until she was glancing right down into the forbidden depths of Winry's stained panties. A look of deep thought quickly devoured her face. "When did this happen?"

"Today," Winry whispered, as if speaking of the atrocity would make it that much worse.

"And this was the first time?"

"Yes."

Eyes closing with meditative intention, May went about doing whatever it was she did, leaving Winry openly flaunting her nudity and Ed trying hard not to stare (too much). Her eyes popped back open with a knowledgeable twinkle.

"It's okay," she stated with cheery professionalism. "Everything will probably be just fine."

Ed stood up, a look of flustered relief written all over his face. "See Winry? I told you—"

"Probably?" the word dropped from Winry's mouth heavily. "What do you mean _probably_?"

The young girl's eyes clouded over slightly, blotting their previous confidence. "Well, you see… there is a _slight_ chance that something could go wrong…"

Winry felt her heart choke on its own blood. Her face must've looked absolutely petrified, because both May and Xiao Mei were quick to wave their hands around in unconcerned assertion. "It's only a slight chance though! The problem should fix itself before you give birth."

Sensing that Winry was unable to make a peep, Ed spoke up, a fresh look of concern shadowing his face. "And what if it doesn't?"

Silence engulfed the room, taking over and dominating the previous feeling of immense density with a sombre weightiness, one that was capable of making even the sturdiest bones and muscles unsure of their strength.

However, May combated the darkening atmosphere with a huge smile, perfectly timed so as to break the cycle of silence before it possessed them all, hurtling them into a vicious cycle of chronic, psychological despair. "It won't, don't worry!" Pulling up Winry's underwear, May slipped her hand into both Winry's and Ed's, her face beaming up at them with a look of such carefree cuteness, it made you wonder if Xing people really _were_ as sly and under-the-table cunning as they were made out to be. "Now, let's go eat donuts, shall we?"

If only. If only Winry could happily skip to the kitchen and stuff her face full of hot, sugary donuts, wallowing in the feeling of crumbs tumbling into her bra and sugar crystals sucking the moisture out of her lips. Shit like that couldn't happen anymore. She couldn't…

As May began tugging them towards the kitchen, Winry glanced over at Ed, her eyes porcelain blue as a shaky horizon of tears distorted their beauty. Noticing her explicit distress, he shot her a cute little sideways smile, his trademark grin that, normally, would've manipulated her own face into smiling right back. But this time, the underlying layer of immense worry was too evident beneath Ed's smiling, seemingly unconcerned face for Winry to smile back. Eyes cracked by swollen blood vessels, cheeks tingling with the pain of holding back tears, Winry knew, with sickening certainty, that her everything, and the thing that she had created with her everything, were not okay. Nothing was okay. Nothing.

Tears seared her face with a carnivorous burn.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **lolol, can you tell what things I was craving while writing this chapter? ;3 Funny how personal little bits like that slip into written work...  
>Sooo, what's wrong with Winry now? And it's the truth, bleeding during pregnancy is normally not a good sign at all. But who knows, maybe she's just overreacting...<br>These chapters started getting more and more difficult to write. Purely because I haven't a freaking clue what it's like to be pregnant. I did tons of research of course, but research cannot nearly make up for experiencing the real, miraculous thing. So trying to describe what it felt like to feel a baby moving from within you was quite the challenge, and took some very intense visualization from me. Meh...

Hope you enjoyed a little! Keep staying tuned for more to come! And thank you again for your continued support and love for this story, it means the world to me and some of your reviews make my life! Thank you! Arigatou gozaimasu~


	7. Chapter 7

* ~ 20 weeks later ~ *

The time had finally come. The thing that Winry had been waiting for, had been dying to see for what seemed like ages, that she'd visualized and imagined with maddening vividness, it was coming to her, it was coming with a veil of holy white light surrounding it and making it look like a god, it just looked so good, so pain-numbingly heart-burn alleviatingly good, oh how she wanted to suck the life out of that bowl of rich, creamy delectableness—

"Here," Ed placed the gigantic ice cream sundae before her, its towering, gently melting palatial form entering her vision with majestic definition; the spoon was shoved into Winry's mouth before Ed could even sit down.

Taste buds waltzing about in chilled delight, Winry stuffed her mouth till it screamed out in frozen horror, begging not to be fed any more cool delicious spoonfuls until it had recuperated from the ice cream overkill. How beautiful it was, having her chest feel as if it were being stabbed by thousands of tiny little ice needles, making her cringe in a potently numb pain that made her want to clutch her head and bang it atop the table while simultaneously wailing out in blissful relief as her heartburn sizzled to a throbbingly unimportant life-interruption.

"Do you have any idea how much that thing cost?" Ed remarked candidly, his eyes still bulging in shock at the sight of such a monstrous, money-leaching sundae. "Not to mention I had to stand in line with a bunch of women for at least half an hour…"

Spoon still protruding ridiculously from her mouth, Winry put on her best display of eyelash batting, twinkly eyed adorableness. "But you did it 'cause you love me."

His response was a petulant 'chi', accompanied by both a mild sprinkling of blush and hasty diverting of the eyes. "No kidding."

"Awww, don't be in such a pissy mood Mr. Elric," she ripped the spoon from her mouth, its flimsy plastic edges being copiously shoved into one of the largest lumps of fudge-coated sprinkle-infested whip cream choked ice cream she could find. "Here, have a bite!"

"No."

"Come on…"

"Winry _no_!"

With a defiant smirk she continued to levitate the mound of dripping ice cream towards him, fully determined to insert that cheap piece of plastic into his tightly-clamped mouth if she had to pull out her screwdriver and chisel away an opening. She dived forward, the tip of the spoon jabbing Ed in the cheek as he quickly turned his head away from the milky delivery. The offering plopped off the spoon with graceless refinement.

"Look what you did!" Winry instantly shifted to her finest pout. "Your stupid stubbornness just wasted my god-sent gift of incredible edibleness!"

"_My_ stubbornness? Who was it shoving the damn thing in my face to begin with?"

Winry stuffed her mouth full of ice cream, a not so pleased grunt managing to fumble its way out of her packed mouth. She'd like to see _him_ carrying around twenty-five extra pounds of weight all day…

Yet, despite the masterpiece of ice cream radiating its cool deliciousness before her, a hollow feeling of fear was gnawing at her stomach, helming its delicate tissue lining till there was hardly any room to breathe, all the excess room she had had before to exhale with the full aptitude of her lungs had been darted into this tightly bound, stiffly sewn creation that was incapable of moving, incapable of properly exchanging oxygen with carbon dioxide. But this feeling… she was getting rather used to it now. Always knowing. Never leaving. The eternal perceptiveness of the error.

She was still bleeding. Every day, she'd pull down her panties, with a look of malnourished edginess, and see that bright, bright red greeting of vaginal leakage, that marking, that tattoo that visually assured her of the error her body was nurturing. It stalked her, followed her everywhere she went, ruined every little moment of happiness, spoiled every little moment of peace, extinguished every ounce of enjoyability the day had to offer. And now, here it was again, killing off her appetite with its invisible yet very palpable threats. She swallowed a runny spoonful of ice cream, the taste no longer present.

With autonomic motherly instinct Winry felt her hand gravitate towards her stomach. It was big now… the kind of big where you feel as if you're radiating your own field of gravity, and people's eyes are just naturally drawn to the unnaturally natural bulge. And you knew it was really big when simple things garnered a new sort of complexity about them, a complexity that you'd never fully realized existed until you could hardly wrap your bodily movements around it anymore. Traveling up and down stairs was one of those phenomena. Every time you went to take a step, just when your body instinctively thought that its entire weight had been fully shifted from one foot to the other, you'd fall backwards, quickly reminded of the additional mass you had forgotten to take into account. And then, to top it all off, going up and down those treacherous steps felt about equivalent to running an uphill marathon, relentless and energy-sapping. She'd never before realized the immense energy it took to climb a simple set of stairs.

Luckily, Ed had been a huge support for her as she'd adjusted to this inevitable metamorphosis. He'd always be there, donating his strength whenever she felt weak, or rebalancing the homeostatic levels of her moods whenever they had forgotten their own symbiosis. And of course, satisfying her every craving that popped up with the impeccably timed abruptness associated with most pregnancy yearnings. Despite the swearing that would sometimes accompany it, he would still always give in to her (sometimes) insane demands, staying at her side for as long as she needed him, always sacrificing his own time and feelings for the sake of her comfort and pleasure. Even if he didn't outwardly admit it, she could tell that he was developing a very powerful sense of protection over her… her and their baby... she could just tell.

In fact, the biggest giveaway, and the moment Ed had come closest to verbalizing his newfound fatherly concerns, happened just the other night, in their bedroom, at some ungodly hour…

_The sensation, it wouldn't stop. It just kept leaking, kept oozing, kept dribbling out of her vagina, wetting her underwear and salivating all over its soft, cottony cleanliness, like some kind of rabid, diseased animal. It felt dirty. It felt vulgarly wrong. Her ovaries were crying, spilling their ruby red droplets of bloody despair, of symbolic wreckage, freely and continually, reminding her of the future that she wasn't even sure of, whispering to her the terrifying events that were sure to unfold, that spun her immature motherly instincts into a place of deep dark hiding, a place where they would surely be dissociated. That… that fluid… that vile, unbearably red, delectably red red fluid…. it made her question everything that had been made into answers. It made her answer questions that didn't need to be answered. Not now, at least. But they'd still been answered. The only solidity within her, the only completely solid truth that everyone tried to convince her wasn't solid truth but she knew, she bloody well knew was solid, solid truth, sat in her gut, rotting like some lazy pestle that just churned away at all the fleeting instances of joy pregnancy was supposed to entail. But not her. She screwed up. Her body had screwed up. _

_Sleep appalled her. How could she even give in to its selfish hypnosis, knowing that the error festering within her was only growing worse and worse? It made her nauseous, just thinking about the fluttering of her eyeballs as they spazzed into their nightly ritual of REM, the violent changes in brainwaves that would assault her brain and puzzle it into a state of vulnerability, leaving it naked and exposed to the demonic gates of the nightmare world. That's why she wouldn't sleep. She couldn't. She couldn't allow her stupid body to rest, not when it still had to atone for its mistake, a mistake that she knew and understood nothing about but that felt heavier and much more corporeal than any feeling she'd ever had the torturous pleasure of feeling before. Sleep was appalling. _

_Her eyes, too tired from straining to remain open, too exhausted from blinking for over twenty four hours without rest, began to wet themselves. They wetted themselves until there was nowhere else for the wetness to go, it had no other choice but to snake its way down her face and drizzle it in the sweet, tangy liquid of eye moistening agent. She blinked a few times, her eyelashes getting caught in the sticky film of water billowing up along her lower eyelid. Her hand snappishly wiped the liquid away, unable to tolerate the cold-warm presence. _

_The bed suddenly felt very hard. It pushed against her back, dug into her spine until she was certain a fossilized record had been implanted into the mattress, outlining every bone and every segment of cartilage. The blanket was like a tangible form of claustrophobia, embracing her in this breath-murdering, mind-seizing coil that left her breathless and frightened. She wanted to purge the sense of touch. She wanted to remove it right out of the depths of her body. She hated this bed, trying to win her over with its false sense of comfort, its lying warmth, its fictional spaciousness—_

"_Winry."_

_Fuck. She'd woken him. Fuck… _

"_You're thinking about it again, aren't you?" Ed's voice was softly direct. _

"_No," the lie slipped through her teeth, inched past her lips, kissed the air with its poisonous, untruthful contents that could corrode aura…_

"_I'm not dumb, Winry."_

_Her hand smacked across her eyes, cupping them in even richer darkness than before. "I wasn't."_

_A gentle warmth was rubbing her stomach, sending it into a soothing tingle; Ed's hand was rubbing it, creating a layer of warmth over it, while his other hand clasped Winry's free hand still lying limply beside her. "This is our kid, Winry."_

_She responded with a pitiful 'mhm', her fingers squeezing his hand till they quivered in retaliation. _

"_You're not the only one who has to suffer."_

"_But it's my body that created the problem!" her voice escalated, droplets of water shimmying down her face. "It's my fault…"_

"_Hey," Ed's voice had grown even more serious. "How many times have you given people a reason to live?"_

_The question burned her ears, ate away at their flesh with avid toxicity. "Stop it…"_

"_How many times have you given people the resources they need to live a happy, fulfilling life Winry?"_

"_This is different…"_

"_It is not," he fired back adamantly. "This is no different."_

_Her underwear was burning, scratching, itching her vagina, making it sweat and bleed and leak out its forbidden secret, stinging her with its luscious reminder that things were not okay, that they weren't going to be okay, that they never would be okay—_

_She flipped her head around, blue eyes burning into Ed's like spheres of flaming sky before quickly erupting into sparkling wet orbs. "I can't fix this Ed. I can't."_

_The distance between them, as they lay so miserably atop that deceitful bed, decreased. Her body heat told her so. _

"_Even if you can't," his words landed lightly atop her face, bathing it for a fleeting second in his warm, assuring breath. "That doesn't mean you have to sit here suffering like this."_

"_I'm… I'm…" the words stuck to her throat, the physical push required to unlatch them making her sound weak and shaky. "I'm s-supposed to be an a-a-automail m-mechanic, yet I can't even—"_

"_Winry," even beneath the fog of darkness, Ed's gold eyes clearly struck her, injecting her with their hopeful glimmer and bathing her in their unwavering belief. "Do you think it's a boy or a girl?"_

_The question caught her off guard. She blinked a few times, the automatic feeling of excitement associated with the question welling up inside her, wiping away the wet goop that sucked at her skin and reminded her of the unfixable error, providing a barrier that temporarily separated her mind from the constant whip of torture it so greedily cracked upon her, day in and day out…_

"_A boy," her mouth could no longer contain its smile. "It's a boy."_

_Ed's face looked slightly shocked at her certitude. "Really?"_

"_Really."_

_She didn't know how, didn't know why; she just knew. She could just feel it, whenever she took a breath, whenever she rubbed her tummy, whenever she talked to the little bundle of life forming and growing so extraordinarily within her… she just knew…_

"Winry?"

"Huh?" she snapped out of her reminiscing state, the lines and shapes and colors of reality, of the café that they were currently sitting at, where she was engulfing her ice cream sundae at, making her eyes fizz with color-overload. "I'm sorry, did you say something?"

"Uh, not really…" Ed was giving her a suspicious sort of look, his eyes analyzing her appearance with that familiar look of loving concern. "You just… are you feeling okay?"

She took a giant scoop of ice cream from the bowl, a suctiony slurping sound giving way as she packed the melting treat onto her spoon. "I'm fine." She chomped on the ice cream thoughtfully, a little jolt of coldness thundering through her brain. "Although, if you really must know, I have been having pretty regular contractions lately…"

His eyes nearly popped right out of their sockets. "Does that mean you're in… uhh…. uhhhm…"

Winry couldn't help but giggle a little. "Labour?"

"Yeah, that."

She stabbed her spoon into a growing pothole of ice cream. "Maybe, maybe not, I dunno…"

"You—" she could tell this topic was difficult for him to wrap his masculine brain around. "Y-You don't…. know?"

"Oh quit worrying already!" Winry gave a sinister little wink. "You'll know when I'm in labour. _Trust_ me."

He looked as if he'd just witnessed her pulling the Philosopher's Stone out of her bra. "I… I _will_?"

"Of course you will idiot!" she smacked him across the forehead with her spoon, a light glaze of saliva shimmering in its place. "The minute I fall to the floor and start rolling around, screaming in pain and calling for a doctor, you'll know I'm in labour. Or if my water breaks and _then_ I start screaming and rolling on the ground and convulsing in pain—"

"OKAY, okay, I got it," Ed frivolously gave his forehead a wipe, a look of evident horror making his eyes shine profusely. "The minute you start acting like a drama queen, I'll be sure to call a doctor."

"HEY!" This time she threw the stupid spoon right at his stupid head.

"OW!"

"Oh please, like that _actually_ hurt you!"

"What the hell'd you do that for?"

"For being an insensitive little twit obviousl—" a gut-wrenching contraction killed her words mid-sentence, forcing her to double over and fight down the last scoop of ice cream she'd just engulfed.

"What's wrong?" Ed's chair scraped against the floor with an ear-blowing screech. "Winry?"

"I-I'm fine," she panted, her arms about the same consistency as jello. "Just a little… c-contraction."

Almost as soon as she'd gotten to her feet another contraction attacked her lower body; a tightly-bound squeezing sensation was juicing her dry of all blood and liquid, swiftly followed by a gut-wincing puncturing that repetitively stabbed at her stomach, over and over and over until it was forced to deflate, hang from her veins like a limp piece of meat, smacking her lower back with cold, wet thrashing motions. She hobbled backwards, unable to escape the pain, unable to free herself from the binding pulses that felt like they were ripping her body in half. She stumbled to a standstill as Ed came up behind her, his hands grasping her, protecting her from the looming hands of gravity that could so easily manipulate a pain-stricken individual.

"Is _this_ labour?" his voice was taut with panic.

"N-No…" Winry managed to give him a small smile, the pain fading into the pits of her body like a slowly aging echo. "It's still too early for labour."

"Well you could've told me that before…" With a huff, he draped his arm across Winry's shoulders, his face trying to regain its former look of cool nonchalance. "Let's go home."

Secretly relieved to be safely tucked in Ed's arm, Winry let her body weight melt into his, her footsteps mocking his with lazy, half thought-out precision. She relished the feeling of his arm muscles and how they would ever so lightly press against her shoulders, and how, whenever she'd swerve slightly off-track, his arm would pull her right back in towards him with a protective sort of immediacy. She loved those kinds of moments. It was during them that she could always be reminded, in that cute, physical way, of Ed's true feelings.

Just being with him like this… just her, no one else… it made her feel special in that immature teenage girl kinda way. It made all the waiting games of the past seem like dust atop her memories. It made her insides burn up in a fit of embarrassed excitement, squealing and tingling and acting all ridiculous over the fluffiest of touches, it was so ridiculous, yet at the same time so so devilishly enjoyable. Her crotch stiffened up in mock orgasmic delight, a wave of incredible warmth trickling from her vagina, down her groin, onto her thighs, it was such a nice, warm feeling, like a gently heated blanket of silky liquid—

Liquid. Why was she feeling liquid? What had just been a pleasant sensation of warmth now felt like a toxic meltdown of her flesh, coating her legs in its thick film of lukewarm liquid. Perhaps the contractions had burst open one of her organs, or perhaps they had irritated her uterus, enraging it and making it spout more bloody drops of error-ridden discharge until her underwear hadn't been a good enough landing pad, the blood felt the need to seep down her legs and coat her skin in its evil, hollow warmth, perhaps that was—

No. That wasn't it.

"Ed…"

That wasn't it at all.

"Yeah?"

She knew what it was.

"I think… "

Her water broke.

Amniotic fluid dribbling down her legs, Winry glanced up at Ed, a pained smile overtaking her face. "I think I'm in labour."

The time had come. This game, this nine month waiting game, it was finally escalating to a climatic conclusion. No more puke-filled mornings. No more blood scalding heartburn. No more bloody water paintings atop her underwear. It was all—

Winry suddenly hunched over in pain, her stomach contorting about in miserable somersaults and fierce aerials that yanked her insides all about. Things were shifting within her… things were moving, things were pushing, things were going faster than she'd been prepared for, her head spun in shock, she could hardly make out the ground, she didn't know if she was standing or sitting anymore, she felt like she was the second hand on a big, giant clock, the world was being flipped, reversed, spinning out of context—

"Winry!" Ed's voice slammed through her dizziness; she realized she was being held up by him, the world around her at a forty-five degree angle. "Is this seriously… even though you just…. or are you—"

"YES!" The contractions were coming repetitively now, composing an intricate orchestration of intense rhythmical cannons, it was just one after another, the breaks in between mundane as the body struggled to recall its peaceful state of homeostasis before amplifying yet another chorus of contractions. Blood crashing like symbols, heart percussively spazzing, muscles being strung like cello strings—the composer of such bodily chaos was undeniably Labour.

"Shit Winry, if this is a joke I—"

"DOES IT LOOK LIKE I'M JOKING EDWARD ELRIC?" she gripped aggressively at her sides, tearing the skin away from her ribs, peeling it off each and every bone till she thought the pain might actually override the crescendo of contractions smashing her abdominal region. "I NEED A DOCTOR!"

"Oh fuck," Ed's voice immediately adopted a tone of horrified bewilderment. Winry could feel him looking around, his fingers digging into her shoulder bone as alarm gripped him in a way he had hardly ever experienced. "Dammit, where the _fuck_ is Al when you need him?"

"It's… c-coming," her words barely made it out of her throat, the pressure building around her lower back increasing with seemingly exponential intensity. "Ed it's coming…"

"Okay, uhh, deep breaths Winry," he wasn't even trying to compress the panic anymore, his words quivering with illegibility and redundant syllables. "Just, um, take it easy, and uh…. ah screw it!"

Winry suddenly felt an arm slide beneath her knees and another behind her back, and realized with a prickle of vertigo that he was now carrying her.

"The hospital's not far," his voice, tense yet strangely soothing, barely made it to her ears before another swarm of contractions pelted her insides. "So hold on tight!"

Lethargically Winry wrapped her arms around Ed's neck, the air whistling through her hair as she held on as tightly as her body would allow.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **I really don't have much to say this morning... I dunno, my writing just seems like a bunch of crap at the moment, so I'll refrain from saying what I really wanna say and just close with "Hope you all enjoyed! Stay tuned for chapter 8"!


	8. Chapter 8

A puppet. That's what she looked like. That's what she felt like. She couldn't even lift her arm without a plume of tubes flapping about, deep wine-colored liquid sloshing through their transparent networking with sluggish viscosity. Being sewn to the hospital like this, commandeered to its filamental lifelines, its threads…. she looked like a fucking puppet. That was their only purpose. Not to supply life, but to supply degradation masked by the _promise_ of life. And that wasn't even the worst sight in the room. Far from it.

Even more painful than the jarring contractions, strangling and tightening her insides into undoable knots, producing a pain that murdered the senses so badly, you could feel it in the afterlife…. even worse than all that was the sight of the blood. It wouldn't stop. It wouldn't fucking stop. Mounds of blood-drenched rags would be taken from out beneath her crotch, glistening in its runny expansionism, drowned out of all former purity, drooling like dysfunctional salivary glands across the unimpressed sheen of the floor, successfully autographing its asymmetrical splats in every place you didn't want to see them. She could feel the liquid, the liquid that was supposed to be gliding inside of her, streaming out of her vagina, pooling into this asymmetrical lake on the hospital bed, staining the sheets and staining the covers and staining hands, tools, everything, it just had to goopishly smear and blanket and drown and strangulate and…

The tangy scent of hospital narcotically soothed Winry. It smelled good, that crisp scent of intense hygiene. It took away from the raw scent of all the blood trying to overtake the room, trying to exit her body, trying to leave her pale and liquidless, useless and unable. It smelled so good, it was like a heinous aromatherapy breeze, a stingy slap in the face. It woke one up. Reminded one where they were.

"Okay Winry, you can start pushing now, nice and gently."

The thought of pushing made her stomach give a suicidal twinge; every organ and every muscle already felt as if it were pushing against her, forcing her onto this bed of needles, needles on top of needles, needles giving birth to needles and vomiting needles and colonizing needles atop needles atop needles. The incessant prickling left her holey and leaking, delving bloody freckles atop her stomach, her back, everywhere, everywhere, it was connect the dots in all its gory macabre glory, a pattern of imaginary playtime realism. The air licked them coolly, making her blood shrivel and shriek, the nets of fibrinogen just couldn't capture the platelets, they couldn't, they were too afraid, too afraid to extend a helping hand, too afraid to repair the freckles gushing droplets of blood, they grasped at her plasma futilely, the plasma was welling up in her mouth, coating it in watery broth, blood broth, a watery soup of leukocytes and cellular debris and—

She squeezed downwards, the area just above her vagina feeling like it was going to burst open into a firework display of blood and tissue. The baby, she could feel it forcing its way through her vaginal tube, expanding the seemingly unexpandable until there was no where left to expand, until the raw, tangy taste of blood clawed at the back of her throat, liquidlessly drowning her, encapsulating her, trying to flow out yet another hole in her body. Everything was bulging, everything was ready to just give out on her, she couldn't push any more, she could feel the blood gushing out, lubricating the bed into a soggy slate of bloody sheets, if she pushed more it would all just come rushing out, she couldn't, she couldn't—

Her hand was suddenly blanketed in an encouraging clasp of warmth; Ed was with her. He'd been with her the whole time. Despite probably being scared out of his fucking mind, petrified at the sight of so much blood coating things it shouldn't be coating, he had remained by her side, always assuring, always comforting. If it hadn't been for him, carrying her into the hospital and yelling at every doctor and every nurse within hearing-distance that she was going through labour, who knows if she'd be in this bed right now, painting its white sheets sunset red. She was doing this all for him. This was their creation, after all. Their beautiful, beautiful creation.

"I'm right here Winry," he murmured rigidly. "Just squeeze my hand as tight as you want."

He was her everything. Her annoying, dirty-mouthed, arrogant little everything. No, not little… not little…

A shriek of pain came hurtling out of Winry; the contractions had evolved, into these sort of tightening, gripping sensations that felt lined with needles, they'd poke and jab their pointy tips into her until blood spurted out from all directions, joining the river of it that was dripping, free-falling out of her vagina, shattering into magnificent shards of liquid, forcing every tangible thing to slurp it up like a parched sponge. Her innards had become carnivorous, cannibalistic, ripping flesh from bone and stabbing bone through flesh, it was a butcher shop, the contractions' searing blades slicing her uterus into slabs of weary muscle, scraping her ovaries till they cried out in blood, blood that was incapable of buffering, incapable of flowing through her body without grating away delicate bits if tissue, flowing and flowing till it gushed right out of her vagina with succulent rebellion. The internal blows came in crushingly cruel surges now, drumming her body and producing ribbons of heat, heat that just dissipated off of her, frolicked off into the hungry jaws of the air. She was so cold, all she could do was donate what little body heat she had left to the delivery process, superheating her blood till it was thin and runny, melting her mucus into a stream of milky discharge that lubricated the baby, made it slip agonizingly down the trembling path of her vagina. Muscles pushing with all the naivety they could possibly transmute into physicality, a giant cramping sensation began blocking the way; a psychosomatic barricade with no tangible suppression, it put unnecessary pressure against her baby's fragile body and scoured across her numbly screaming gut, picketing itself firmly into her tissue, allowing nothing to surpass its indiscernible solidity. But…

It wasn't working. Her body wasn't letting the baby come out. Something was wrong, something was very very very wrong—

"Winry," Ed whispered her name so delicately, so caringly, the squirming of her body grew a touch calmer. "You can do it. You're the best mechanic in the world. This is nothing, right?"

All she could do was squeeze his hand in response. Borrowing his support, picturing the look of his warm, golden eyes, she gave another powerful push; the baby was coming. Her bottom half may have felt like a balloon filled with flaming urine, but that baby was on its way, and she was the only one who could get it there. She let loose a pained grunt, her body trembling from the aftershock of the baby slipping further down her birth canal. The contractions were arriving in vehement waves now, striking her in a dog-pile of thrashes and jolts, jerking her spinal bones till they pinched and squeezed the tender nerves swirling down her back, raging into one fitting, endlessly screaming cord of psychosis. She gave another push, her hand squeezing every ounce of color from Ed's.

"That's it Winry, we can almost see the head!"

She gave an agonized groan, the knowledge of knowing that she was almost there replenishing her strength significantly.

"You're doing amazing," Ed smiled, overjoyed disbelief making his words shaky.

Winry tried to smile, but instead produced more of a distressed grimace; her vagina was being uncontrollably stretched, producing a ceaseless searing sensation that prickled all the way up her spinal cord. The whole bottom half of her body felt like an over-handled, over-stretched piece of dough, dough that yanked at her nerve endings with filmy vigour, forcing them into either spasms of bone-fracturing pain or rife neuronal aberration, but she kept on pushing, kept on fighting, absolutely nothing about to get in the way of her baby entering into this world of life and dreams, she just kept pushing and pushing and—

Her baby… no matter how hard she pushed… something was… it wouldn't move. It was caught on something. It wasn't like before, how when she pushed, a constricting shoot of pain would inform her of the baby's progress. The pushes weren't working now. She grunted in laborious effort, squeezing with all her might, her fingers strangling Ed's hand bones as she strained to push the baby further down her birth canal, wanting more than ever to feel that beautiful sensation of the baby's head ripping her tissue beyond stretching capacity. The contractions now seemed like mild background obstructions, little flicks of pain that simply pushed her to try harder, pushed her to overcome the pain that was sapping her body of all heat and feeling. The tubes pinned to her arms fluttered about, awakened from their hanging slumber as Winry got into a sturdier position.

That's when the feeling came back… that feeling that something was terribly, terribly wrong. It appeared with a nauseating, almost magical tingle, at first trickling droplets of memory into her mind before fully submerging her into the full-on remembrance of her bloody underwear, the underwear that had been the canvas for her body's error, the underwear that had sucked up every ounce of bloody discharge leaking from her vagina, dripping secretively, sinisterly…

Teeth grinding against each other, Winry continued to push past the thoughts, ignoring the flood of memories and focusing solely on the little bundle of life trying so hard to come out of her. She adjusted her breathing, using it as an effective harmonizing tool to align her breaths with her pushes. Whatever it took, she would get that baby past that unknown obstacle—

An excruciating snapping feeling sent her vocal cords into a psychotic fit. Body seizing up in convulsive petrification, Winry slammed her back against the bed, thrusting it deep enough to bang the metallic frame. Her breaths came out in spastic, fitful gags, the air tasting sour and bitter, she couldn't swallow it, couldn't use it, it was like antifreeze evading her lungs, slowly but certainly burning down each and every little sac of air, she twisted and twisted, trying to escape the arresting grasp of her body, trying so hard to peel herself away from the skin of feeling strapping her to this world of death-orchestrating agony. A tremendously paralyzing stab of pain had wrenched her body into a state of chaotic insanity, as if her entire vagina had just been ripped open by two giant metal clamps, its inside being rubbed with battery acid, the feeling wouldn't stop, her screaming wouldn't stop, she couldn't stop for fear of discovering what had actually happened, what had actually gone wrong, the error just wouldn't stop—

Panicky voices shattered the aura of calm professionalism that had previously enveloped the room. Eventually Winry's voice gave out on her, her vocal cords thoroughly exhausted from exerting themselves at full force so abruptly. She tried to lift her head, tried to look around, but her vision had become smudged; a translucent veil was varnishing her eyes, making everything a hazy blur of color-faded movement. Desperately, madly, she tried calling for Ed, frantically coaxing her vocal cords to work one last time, but hardly a grumble made it past her lips.

Her body was almost completely numb as she watched the watercolors zoom by, right by her face, some closer to her than others, it was all very pretty really, watching the world rotate in unique, pastel shades, it made life seem so soft and simple. Just like her breaths. How soft and feathery they were now, barely a thread of air coming in or out of her mouth, not even enough to disrupt the teensy tiny facial hairs all along her face. Her head had never felt so light. It felt empty yet at the same time not, as if it housed a platoon of cotton balls, all marching about in that fluffy, frivolous way they do, hup two thee for, hup two three four…

Wait….. wait, what was she doing? Oh… that's right. Yes. She was giving birth…. Wasn't she? Mhm… giving birth…. to her first child…. to her and… her…. and….

Ed.

She awoke with a gasp, a gasp that rattled her body and hungrily drew from the air, the air that wasn't in the mood for sharing, that wasn't offering its generosity to her lungs at that moment. Her eyes seemed to be wearing a strange set of lenses, lenses that made it look like she was lying beneath two glasses of water, looking up at the world through their bottoms and through their refractive liquid, she could just barely make out moving figures, scurrying about hurriedly, back and forth, back and forth, it made her a tad dizzy if she watched for too long, in fact it made her quite dizzy if she didn't watch for long enough, or if she didn't blink enough, or… or….

"WINRY!"

His voice was just the cue she needed to come back into full consciousness. With a jolt, Winry sat up a little, although the minute she went too far her body collapsed on her and threw her against the flattened surface of the bed. The world had become insanely vibrant—so vibrant, everything almost seemed to be glowing, as if the entire room had been sprayed with neon glow stick juice. She scanned the glowing faces, dissected them all as she searched for Ed, the only person she wanted to see, the only person she _needed_ to see…

An incredible brush of warmth skimmed her cheek. She looked over, ever, ever so slightly, and saw him, his gold eyes submerged in a film of tears. "E… E…"

"W-Winry…" his voice, normally so deep and confident, suddenly had a terrified wobbliness to it. "You… you…" he turned away and took a big sniff. "God dammit, d-don't… don't _do_ that."

She wanted to touch him. She wanted to touch him so badly. Touch his hair. Touch his face. Touch his lips. But her body no longer had the ability to move so wilfully. All she could do was stare up at him, stare with lazy, half-opened doe eyes. It was so weird, seeing him all broken and vulnerable like that. A beautiful kind of weird.

"Ed…" Winry's voice was a gravelly croak. "Is… is the baby… o-okay?"

A tear splintered atop her hand.

"Just d-don't worry about it Winry—"

"Ed," her voice was a raspy, high-pitched mess. "Tell me.

Eyes cast downwards, she watched as his golden bangs fanned across his eyes, sealing them in a flimsy curtain of shadow. With all her strength, or perhaps with instinctive motherly strength, Winry peered over her bulging stomach, swallowing back an uprising of bile as she did so. Her eyes had barely had a chance to focus before they became crippled in tears.

The entire bottom half of her bed was drenched in blood. That was all she could see. Blood. No baby. No smiling nurses' faces. Just blood. Multiple doctors were rushing about, either blood-logged rags piled in their hands or blood-coated tools. Either way, it was glistening in blood. Her blood. The error was everywhere. There was no escape. It was surrounding her, covering her, devouring her…

Tears bloomed from the corners of her eyes, making her cheeks cringle and her face swell in resistance. It was still inside of her. She could feel it pressuring the boundaries of her body, lost and helpless, unable to navigate the maze of reproductive delivery. It wasn't his fault that her body had screwed up. It wasn't his fault his mother was giving birth to blood and not him. He never asked for this. All he ever asked for was life. For a family. For a chance in this world…

Feeling the tears trickle down towards her scalp, outlining her hairline like a feeble tiara, Winry commanded her body to push. The pain instantly flared back up, bubbles of blood frothing from her vagina as her entire body tried to retaliate, tried to rebel against the pushing, but she wouldn't let it, she didn't care how much her vagina screamed at her, begged her to stop pushing something that could no longer be pushed, it felt like a knife was just slowly dragging its edge down the length of her birth canal, slitting it in half, carving a bloody, bloody fault line of reproductive disablement, but she didn't care, she didn't care, she didn't give a fucking, fucking shit….. this was _their_ child. Nothing – absolutely nothing – was going to stop her from giving it life in this world.

"Winry, s-stop it," Ed's hands were clutching her wrist, his voice distraught as he tried to maintain strength. "You're gonna kill yourself! Just fucking stop, let the doctors do their fucking job, let them do the fucking work, just give it up and—"

"No."

"Winry—"

"NO ED!"

Defiantly she went on pushing, the pain piercing her vaginal tissue till she was certain the fault line had diverged, cracked open and begun weeping and spewing hot bubbling blood. But she could feel it, her child's head, it was squeezing past her perineum, slowly dragging it past its maximum stretch-point, the burning sensation was beyond third-degree, her entire body had become a trembling supernova of wildly flaming flesh, her spine a rod of throbbing nerve-blackening tinder, the pain was excruciating, excruciatingly excruciating, yet Winry continued pushing, it was all she could do _not_ to completely lose consciousness, pushing was the only thing that could keep her in touch with the blazing, excruciating presence of reality, it was the least she could do—

Her perineum ripped open, igniting her spine till it became a living strip of gunpowder, its points vomiting sparks of pain and searing heat. Winry wailed out terribly, tiny black dots raining down on her eyes.

"WINRY STOP IT!"

Her ears, they didn't understand reason any longer. She pushed on, the feeling of the baby sliding against her vagina growing less evident, the needles puncturing her arms becoming insufferably evident until finally, her arms fell into a tingly slumber of senselessness. The black dots continued to stain her vision, a few surges of white light temporarily erasing them before they returned with even fiercer potency.

"WINRY!"

People were screaming at her, telling her what to do, crowding needles into every visible vein, but she ignored it, she ignored it all, every ounce of her energy directed at giving birth to her baby, her precious, precious baby. She felt her body give one last massive heave, every muscle pulled to its maximum elasticity, tears streaming abundantly from her eyes, when finally, _finally_…. she felt the baby fall into the world, shrieking with magnificent volume.

The room erupted in joyous commotion, everyone instantly attending to the baby as it cried out in blatant shock. Unable to look, unable to feel her body, Winry immediately collapsed, her breathing doing nothing but creating a pitiful whistling sound as the world celebrated happily around her.

"Winry, you…" she could hardly identify Ed's voice anymore, it sounded so vague and distant. "You did it! You're amazing, you…. W-Win…. Winry… W…. WINRY!"

The black dots exploded into bright, white light. The white light separated into fluffy, puffy clouds. Only the faintest, faintest outline ruined the heavenly whiteness; Ed's outline.

"Ed…" Winry felt as if she was reaching out towards him; she watched her hand grapple at the cloud-plastered landscape, but she felt nothing. "Ed…. I'm sorry…."

"Winry no," not a trace of strength remained in his voice. "Y-You have to see the baby! Our baby! Winry look at him, it's a boy just like you said, look at him! Winry look, just l-look, just look, just….. GOD DAMMIT JUST LOOK AT HIM WINRY!"

She thought she detected the far-off, yet strangely close, sound of crying. She smiled, although she didn't think her face had the capability to, and continued staring at the greyish figure marring the white cloud sky. "You're…. g-g-gonna be… such a… great… f-f-father."

His outline was growing dimmer, his voice growing harder to hear, to interpret. He might've been saying her name. Maybe. But it was pointless now. The clouds were parting to reveal another dazzling burst of white light, there was no turning back, after seeing so much red, so much bloody red, the white looked so comforting, so innocent, so clean and error-free, so…

"WINRY LOOK AT OUR BABY!"

Sobbing. It echoed about, miserably. Oh, how she wanted to comfort Ed. She wanted to comfort him so much. But…

"WINRY!"

She couldn't. It was game over, after all.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **This was the hardest fucking thing I have ever written in my entire life. In the midst of writing it, I had to concentrate so hard on the words or else I would just burst into tears and start inconsolably crying. My goal was to make you feel it. I wanted you to feel the pain and immense discomfort, and I wanted you to cry. I think I failed. I probably failed quite miserably. It makes me feel miserable. I dunno, maybe it's just from trying to edit this (which, btw, was also one of the hardest editing jobs I've ever had), but either way, I feel like crap now. I'm sorry if something was inaccurate. I asked my mom about labour. I researched it. I did everything I possibly could to try and understand it better. Who knows if I succeeded. Oh well... but um, ya, Winry had a pregnancy complication known as placenta praevia, which, of course, without ultrasound technology, cannot be diagnosed. Giant cookie for you if you guessed that one! ;) But ya, it leads to lots of fun stuff, antepartum haemorrhage/ heavy vaginal bleeding, placenta accreta (potentially), maternal/fetal death (potentially)... so basically...

Stay tuned! And good god, I hope you enjoyed.


	9. Chapter 9

**A/N:** The final chapter guys! I know, can you believe it? I can't. And since I gave you all such a terrible cliffy the last time, I decided to be extra nice and post this chapter up a touch earlier then I'd planned too. So, I shall not keep you any longer... enjoy the final addition to Game Over!

* * *

><p>A dark, wood board ceiling was staring down at her as she opened her eyes. The regal puffiness associated with newly washed, barely disturbed bed sheets billowed out around her, her hands compressing the airiness as they laid sprawled beside her. The smell of oil-smeared tools coagulating with the fresh Resembool air, an air that somehow mixed the scents of freshly ploughed wheat, dirt, and sheep… it struck her nostrils with surprising verve. Someone must have left the window open.<p>

She sat up groggily, a yawn breaking her face as she flicked the hair from out of her eyes. Something felt odd. Her bedroom… it just didn't feel the same. Everything looked about right though. She patted her covers, their chilled fluffiness seeming almost _too_ fluffy. Maybe it was because of the dream she'd just had.

Her thoughts were strewn apart as the door creaked open. She looked, a heated rant boiling up in her throat as she expected to see Ed pop his head in and complain to her about having nothing to eat for breakfast, but the face she saw was not who she expected to see.

"Honey look, she's awake!"

The sun-kissed blonde hair, the sparkling azure eyes… it… it was her mother. Her mother was standing in the doorway, smiling that contagious smile of hers. She was quickly joined by her father.

"Mom? Dad?" her voice had never carried such a heavy load of shock. "What are you… how… where…"

They both welcomed themselves right in, eventually seating themselves gently at the end of Winry's bed.

"Is this a dream?"

Her mother shook her head, a knowing twinkle illuminating her eyes. "No. But it's not where you should be, Winry."

She expected an outbreak of tears to assassinate her eyes, but her face remained calm. "But I was just… I dreamed that I was having a child. Wasn't that a dream? That didn't actually happen or—"

"That wasn't a dream either Winry," her father's kind voice answered her this time, his smile only growing as Winry's face crinkled in perplexity. Frantically, she began touching her body, a sense of panic overtaking her that lacked any actual feeling of anxiety.

She couldn't feel anything. No contractions, no cramping, nothing. And her stomach, it was… it was _flat_. It was perfectly flat. Everywhere she touched, an overwhelming sense of lightness came over her, as if trying to mask the real pain and torment that technically _should've_ been crippling her body. Unable to tear her gaze away from her stomach, she began to tremble. "A-Am I dead?"

Her parents exchanged a look before turning back to her. "Honey," her mother leaned in, her hand resting atop Winry's with eerie softness. "You're a mother now."

Just hearing the word, just having the title of the role thrown so casually onto her like that, elicited an overpowering wave of emotion Winry didn't fully understand, awakening an overwhelming feeling of withdrawal, a dangerously addictive yearning, this nerve-numbing, blood-contaminating, crippling longing that just consumed her. Yet almost as soon as the feelings came on, they died out, fizzling into a numb, distant sort of sensation.

"Winry," now her father was leaning towards her, a soft look of pride accenting his face. "Don't leave your child the same way we left you."

"That's right," her mother nodded concurrently. "Edward's going to need all the help he can get, don't you think?"

Ed. Her… her everything. Her heart slammed against her chest, sending her ribs into a furiously vibrating escapade. "Ed…"

Unable to move, unable to connect any thoughts, Winry sat there, gawking, as she attempted to even minutely understand what was going on. Every time a thought floated into her head, it would slip away before she had the chance to revive its cohesive powers. She looked at her parents for support, for even the tiniest of hints, but they just continued smiling back at her, unaffected by her confusion.

"Mom, Dad, I…" she didn't even know what she was saying, her words were just coming out in forceful mumbles, completely unaware of what grammatically preceded them. Her hand levitated with cataleptic impulse towards her stomach.

"Winry," her mother came towards her, gently kissing her atop the forehead before looking deep into her eyes. "Keep making us proud, honey."

"Mom…" she wanted to hug her, but instead was made to lay down by her mother's comforting touch. "D-Dad…"

"Take care Winry," her father was looking down at her, still smiling, along with her mother on the other side, as they both took each of her hands in their own and filled them with healing warmth. "Whenever you need us…"

"… we'll be with you, dear."

Vocal cords struggling to make even the faintest peep, Winry felt her eyelids become unnaturally heavy, as if every one of her eyelashes had been dipped in iron mascara, until her bedroom and her parents' faces became nothing but a mere sliver of light, all blurred and grainy…

_The game wasn't over yet…_

The feeling of iron-clamped eyelids quickly became overridden by the sweltering throb of her vaginal region, its tender fragility openly grieving at its bruised exterior. Violent surges of shivering felt like they were dissecting her body into tiny little bits, an insane coldness chilling her to the point of turning her blood into super-fine popsicles. Never before had she felt so ruthlessly robbed of body heat, her limbs and bones petrified into an icy hypnosis of blizzarding strength.

Trying hard to divert her attention away from the coldness, she focused her eyes on a jungle of tubing, followed by the dreary angularity of the room. Winry tried to sit up, but her body was too tightly sealed within a wrapping of toasty blankets.

A brain-rumbling wailing sound was coming from somewhere nearby, immediately arousing the previous feeling of insatiable, incurable withdrawal pulsing inside of her. The urge to feel her baby, to touch and kiss and share her eternal, endless supply of love, sent her body into a terribly trembling tantrum, throwing her IV tubes into a hiccupping panic, pushing tears from her eyes with abusive intensity—

"W-Winry?"

His voice attacked like the most deadliest of allergens, twisting her body into self-initiated anaphylactic shock till her lungs were too stunned to breathe. Opening her mouth, she begged her voice to overcome its exhaustion. "Ed… is that… you?"

"Winry, y-y-you're…" his voice trailed off, a chain of jerky sobs replacing it momentarily. "Y-You're… you're…. fuck….. y-you're _alive_…"

Finally, she was able to turn her head just enough to see his swollen, tear stained face. "O… Obviously d-d-dumbass—" she took a huge gasp, her voice crushingly weak from both overexertion and tears. "I'm W-Winry Rockb-bell!"

Ed gave a huge, snotty sniffle, briskly wiping his nose across his sleeve before beaming down at her with tear-cracked eyes. "Dammit Winry, you're not supposed to see me like this!"

"Well y-you're not s-supposed to see me l-like this either!"

He gave a crackly laugh, although it swiftly turned to a swearing shout as his head was shoved to the side by a tear-choked Al. "Winry!"

"Get off my leg idiot!"

"Nii-san why didn't you tell me Winry had woken up?"

"Shut up and wipe your snot off already!"

"_Nii_-san!" Shooting him as stern a glare as Al could possibly give, he turned back to Winry, his face a disaster of snot and tears. "Winry, I'm so glad you're okayyyy—" his words broke off into a cacophonous parade of tears.

She smiled at him softly, the tips of it only lengthening as Ed began yelling at him to shut the hell up (completely oblivious to the fact that he was being ten times louder). A flash of black and pink, however, made her turn and look the other way; May was at the side of her bed, a serene look of elation on her face despite her weary, tear-wrangled eyes; a tiny bundle of life was being cradled in her hands—her baby boy.

"It's time to meet your mother, little one," May cooed sweetly, her hands extending towards Winry as she took the baby from her grasp. Holding him snug to her chest, she pushed back the light blue blanket covering his pink skin.

A surge of love so incredibly strong, so indescribably magical, shook Winry into a state of silent awe as she looked upon her baby with wide, mesmerized eyes, his chubby little fingers treading at the air with lively zeal. Every twinge of pain, every little prick, every little throb, it all became trivial somatic trash in the face of such a miraculous bundle. Here she was, holding this breathing, kicking baby that had just lived inside her stomach for almost nine months… her attachment was stronger than the gravitational force of the Sun, stronger than the suction of a black hole, stronger than the explosive death of a star. Nothing could separate them. Nothing could stop her from protecting him. Nothing could sever the bond that would forever tie them as mother and son.

"Isn't it hard to believe?" Ed muttered, his eyes resting on his child with immeasurable love.

Winry kissed his smooth little head, patches of ultra-blonde hair dotting its surface. "It is."

"But it's not hard to believe how small it is!" May piped up, her eyes glinting sharply at Ed. "Just like his father…"

"HEY!"

Winry hardly even noticed the drama unfurling around her; all she cared about was the baby tucked within her arms. Despite him being so underweight, the feeling of his weight resting solely in her arms, so real and so warm… it was incredibly peaceful. Unable to contain herself, she continued to kiss him every five seconds, the need to be as close to her baby boy as humanely possible the only thing in the world that mattered.

"Feel free to feed him, if you're up to it," a nearby nurse was smiling at her encouragingly. "He's probably hungry by now."

Winry looked back down at her baby, a strange rush of knowledge coming to her at that moment. Instinctively knowing what to do, she lifted up her shirt, carefully lifting the baby's tiny set of lips to her nipple. Immediately he began to suckle, leaving Winry stunned by the automatic sense of trust he had in her.

"Hey Winry," Ed was back, although he was still glaring at May off in the corner. "Do you need anything? Water? A blanket? An animal control man to exterminate that bloody panda maybe?"

"Watch your mouth, would you?" Winry scolded, her attention quickly diverting back towards the baby. "I don't want our son to have a dirtier mouth than you."

"With you, I don't think that'd be possible."

The baby unlatched from her nipple, his hands curling up into teensy little fists as he gave a yawn the size of his head. "I think he looks like you."

"You think?"

She nodded lightly. "He totally has your face."

"Yeah, but he definitely has your eyes."

A twinge of joy rung her belly at that comment. Grinning, she lifted the baby from off her chest, a cold empty void replacing his newborn warmth. "Here, hold him."

"What?"

"I wanna see you hold him."

"But…" his voice dropped significantly, cheeks burning up in blush. "I… don't know how."

"Well I didn't either idiot!" Winry shoved the baby right into the crook of his arm, delighted to see Ed's face widen into an expression of petrified interest. The baby began squealing in amusement, his hand yanking at Ed's braid with inquisitive spunk. "Look, he likes you!"

He grinned, obviously pleased that he was able to hold the baby without it throwing a fit. "Well before you held him he was whining nonstop."

Giggling, Winry realized she had become completely numb to the intense exhaustion, pain, and chills her body had been torturing her with. She could still remember, with grotesque vividness, the whole horrific process of pushing and gushing blood in an effort to give birth, the scenes replayed over and over again in her mind for reasons she wasn't quite sure of. Yet now, as she watched her newborn son giggle atop his daddy's shoulder, the whole process seemed like the most surreal experience. She had overcome her body's error, pushed past the blood and nausea and pain, and given life, given force to a miracle.

For nearly nine months she had put up with her body taunting her, sending her messages of bloody distress, purging her of all food and water with almost every passing morning, piercing her with its paralyzing contractions—all for this baby. And then, just when she thought it was all over, that she had lost the game, the game of birth and the goal of life… she came back. And she made a victorious recovery. Motherhood… it was a whole new game. A game she couldn't wait to play. And the best thing about it was…

There was no such thing as game over.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: **WHOOO, it's done! Owatta! As far as this chapter goes, I know I failed miserably with it, and there are so many errors and such, but I'm so sick of editing the crap out of this story now that I just couldn't bring myself to give it the proper maitenence it needed. I know, I'm a terrible human being, I do not believe I will ever be forgiven for this. But ya, of course I wasn't gonna have Winry die! She has to live on to have a baby girl, right? And plus I could never bear to separate my most beloved anime pairing permanently. But I am quite glad I was able to successfully elicit emotions from out of some of my readers. Those of you who told me you were crying or wanted to throw your computers at the wall, thank you very much, your words meant a lot to me and made me feel oh so happy! And I think I went through about 10 virtual kleenex boxes trying to mop up all the stray tears you guys left all over my work, psh! But anyways, a big huge enormous thank you to all of you who stuck with me from the beginning, as well as those of you who joined me throughout this process and to those of you who will read this long after I've completed it. You guys, some of your reviews touched me so deeply... this story was a huge deal for me, and it changed me and my life in ways you probably wouldn't believe. Sounds abnormally sappy, but its the truth, and I feel I've really grown as a writer and individual from writing this particular fanfiction. I hope you were able to find some enjoyment from this story, and hopefully I was able to leave you feeling some sort of emotional pangs or whatnot. I'd love to hear your final comments on the whole story, if you wouldn't mind! So thanks again everyone, and Edwin for EVER!


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